[Effendi]

I came back home from Turkey 2 nights ago.
I bought a Turkcell Hazir Kart prepaid card at Sabiha Gökçen airport in Istanbul at a kiosk where it was written, in English, "Cell phone registration". The man there, BTW, didn't speak nearly any English at all; he just sold me the card with 100 Kontör for 40 YTL and said I didn't need any registration (at least from what I could understand from the Turkish-English mix).

The card worked perfectly for all my holiday. After few minutes I received the automatic configuration SMS for internet, wap and MMS. I just used internet on EDGE and it always worked quite well. Quality of voice was also good (I cannot say the same for Vodafone TR I used with my business postpaid with passport option).

I don't know which tariff I had, all information is provided in Turkish only, which is quite a hard language to understand.

After about 10 days I received 2 SMS from Turkcell, in Turkish, with my IMEI number, saying that I had to register my mobile phone or it would be blocked. Since the deadline was just 3 days after my flight back to Italy (i.e. tomorrow) I wasn't much worried about it, but I went to a Turkcell official shop in Istanbul to ask if I could register. I didn't have my passport with me at that moment (which is compulsory for registration) but they were asking me for a "subscription" also for prepaid, which I never understand what it was... At the end I didn't register it and tomorrow my IMEI will be blocked...

In any case an idiot law and all very complicated way to respect it. Along with the very little English spoken by Turkish people it makes things quite complicated.