Greece HSPA (prepaid and postpaid offers)

[wisniak]

Hi,

I'm finally traveling to Greece on mid April.
I hope that there will be an update here by then.

Are there stores in the Athens airport where I can buy & activate the SIM card (of whatever cellular company I find there)?
I don't want to be stuck w/o a SIM card. I don't know the free WIFI situation in the areas I'm going to be visiting (mostly mountain areas/villages).

And how long till the SIM card is activated (in case this is relevant)? In France it took about 2 days...

I have another alternative, which is to rent here at home a WIFI device which will include an appropriate SIM card. This will cost me about 18 Euros a day for 200MB (even if I won't use even 25% of that..), but the upside is that since the device is WIFI, my wife will be able to use her laptop with the device as well.
And if I'm REALLY lucky, the iPad2 will land here before we travel, so I'll be able to take it with me.

[caliston]

There's a Germanos shop in Athens airport, on the arrivals level after customs. Number 22 here:
http://www.aia.gr/shopping_center/im...airportMap.pdf

Germanos has a franchise with Cosmote, so you'll only be able to buy a Cosmote card there.

I'd be a bit careful of prepaying for a data plan in advance, especially if you're going to be in the mountains. You may well have signal difficulties, and you don't want to restrict yourself to one particular network if you can help it. I have no idea whether your EUR18/day data plan is roaming, or has tie-ins with particular networks in each country. If it does, you may be out of luck. I very much doubt useful free or pay wifi unless you're staying in upper-end hotels.

So if you really need data, I'd buy a SIM card on each network, and then see what signal you get. Cosmote is usually the best, but it varies.

Are you connecting into an internal flight? How long do you have? To buy cards on each network, you can get a train towards Athens and buy cards from shops there. My first suggestion is get a local 'Proastiakos' train (not a metro) to Neratziotissa. Timetable here, it's about 20 mins each way (and EUR8 ):
http://tickets.trainose.gr/dromologi...s/AER-KIAT.pdf
http://tickets.trainose.gr/dromologi...s/KIAT-AER.pdf

Next to Neratziotissa station is 'The Mall Athens', a huge American-style shopping mall. That has Wind, Vodafone and Cosmote shops, as well as Germanos and others. They're also open a lot longer hours than most neighbourhood phone shops (website only gives me Christmas opening times, but mostly 0900-2100, not sure about Sundays).

Or perhaps locals can recommend places nearer the airport (many of the stations are in the middle of a motorway, so aren't best placed for shops)?

Also, if you have an Android phone there are wireless tethering apps (either in Android Market or native in Android 2.2). It turns your data connection into a wireless hotspot. I've seen the ZTE Blade in WIND shops for EUR169 or EUR179, and unlock codes can be freely generated on the web. Not a cheap solution (particularly since we can get the same phone in the UK for £79), but it's the same price as 10 days of your wifi connection! JoikuSpot is a similar app for Nokia, there may well be others for other platforms.