Quote:
Originally Posted by ggking7
I live in the US but I travel a lot and I'd like to set myself up with a good system for international cell phone usage. I've been doing a lot of research and I plan to buy a GSM quad-band unlocked cell phone. I'm trying to figure out the best way to keep the phone working internationally at low rates.
I've been looking at the Yackie SIM card and the rates look good except in the US. Maybe I should buy a local T-Mobile SIM card for use in the US and a Yackie or similar card for traveling? Another option would be to buy a SIM card specific to the country I'm going to from a company like telestial.com, or possibly buy one once I get there. What would you guys recommend?
I'm also planning on using grandcentral.com to forward all calls to my US grandcentral.com number to whichever number I happen to be using. They currently only forward to numbers in the US, but they will be enabling international call forwarding soon. It looks like I could have them forward to my US Yackie number. Once grandcentral.com enables international call forwarding I could also have them forward to the 354 Yackie number. Is that in Iceland?
Are there any other cards that would work well in my situation? Any recommendations or advice for me?
|
Like everything else in technology, things are constantly changing and good advice today might not be so good next month.
Having said that, USA is not gsm territory and there are not very many, if any, sim cards that give good rates in the USA and in Europe say so your plan to get two separate ones is a good idea.
Local sim cards vary as do customs in a country. Right now, there are exceptional good values in UK sim cards where many of the companies are literally giving the cards away (T Mobile UK comes to mind as does Orange UK)...you can also get very very cheap rates on some UK cards to call abroad with rates as low as 3p/minute to call the USA on a T Mobile UK sim card provided you use an auxilliary method you can read about. on Orange UK this can increase to 5p/minute, still a bargain.
Other countries, have much harsher policies...French sim cards are expensive, offer poor rates and thehy steal your credit after limited amounts of time as short as 15 days.....
International sim cards have had varied success; right now United Mobile plus (UM+) seems very stable and gives you free reception of calls in many places of the world with a UK phone number.
Yackie mobile seems to be working okay and if you've been reading the threads you will get a local USA number and pay not too much to receive calls in Europe but it will be useless in an important country such as Switzerland for some unfathomable reason.
Telestial is a rip off joint for local sims....they do piggy back on some of the international sims at not too bad rates but I wouldn't buy a local sim from them as you pay triple or quadruple the price you would pay in the country you need.
That's some general info...if you have specific questions, many of the people here are much smarter than I am especially regarding their own local situations and can give you some very good answers.