Orange in the USA?

[DRNewcomb]

Originally Posted by andy

It reminds me - the first time I ever used a mobile phone was 1989, borrowed from a friend, to the UK from the docks at Caen.

In the days of big analog phones it was not uncommon to find people using cells as much as 90 to 100 miles from the tower. This required a high location, such as a hill or a tall building, and a very good antenna. But it was possible.

[petkow]

Originally Posted by andy

Even across the Channel ?! Not Dover - Calais then. Which ferry company - one with longer Spanish routes as well?

I was crossing from Roscoff to Plymoth (around 5hrs). You're right, on other days the same ship also did the much longer Santander to Plymouth. It was in June 2004 and as far as I remember the ship was the then brand new mv Pont-Aven from Britanny ferries.

A bit of googling on the matter has shown me that Brittany Ferries, Minoan Lines, Superfast Ferries and Discovery Cruise line all use SIMMIN (from Iceland Telecom) as their airtime provider, and Geolink OceanCell handles the sat uplink services. Apparantly everything is fairly pricy, but not as bad as it used to be. By the sound of it outgoing SMS are charged at around €1 and incoming and outgoing calls are all around the €0.80/min mark or standard 'old fashioned' roaming rates

Question begs to be asked, but for people who works on these ships (or who travel on them frequently) could they buy a prepaid Frelsi card from SIMMIN (http://www.prepaidgsm.net/en/islanda/siminn.html) and get cheaper call rates? I doubt it!

[petkow]

Originally Posted by petkow

A bit of googling on the matter has shown me that Brittany Ferries, Minoan Lines, Superfast Ferries and Discovery Cruise line all use SIMMIN (from Iceland Telecom) as their airtime provider

Ah.. as an update to that (and apologies that this is going off topic), I have just read that as of the beginning of 2007, SIMMIN no longer provides airtime services for these ships:
http://www.siminn.co.uk/english/abou...e63/item31197/
From another ferry crossing on another route, I noticed an IOM provider which I wrote about here:
http://www.prepaidgsm.net/forum/cell...59.html?t=2159

To get back on topic, does anyone else know of any other extra-territorial GSM providers?