March 28, 2024

Tool Kit: Packages Lower Cost of Travel With a Cellphone

Actually, overseas cellphone bills do not have to be huge anymore, as long as you do some planning.

After facing years of stinging criticism that they charged exorbitant fees to subscribers traveling to other countries, several major American mobile carriers have come up with overseas calling packages that cut costs to a small fraction of what they once were.

As a result, the additional cost of using a cellphone in many other countries may end up being a minor inconvenience, rather than motivation to take out a second mortgage.

Unfortunately, no one solution will work for everyone. Which approach you take depends on your current carrier, the countries you are visiting and your tolerance for changing calling habits while away from home.

THE FIRST STEP You can keep your existing cellphone number and buy a data package, a voice roaming package or both from most American carriers.

Alternatively, if your phone is unlocked (meaning it will work on any other network) and you are going to a place that uses the GSM phone standard, which includes Europe and the United States (the ATT and T-Mobile networks), you can buy a local SIM card. This gives you your own phone number based in the country you are visiting.

ROAMING PACKAGE VS. SIM CARD If you buy a reduced-rate roaming package from your carrier, you will still use the regular mobile number that your friends and relatives know. If they are calling from the United States, they will pay only for a local call in the United States, which for many cellphone and landline users means they actually do not pay anything extra, whether you are in Turkey or the Shetland Islands.

If you would rather buy a local SIM card, it may prove a challenge if you are going to a country in which the local mobile phone store employees are unlikely to speak English (although many cellphone stores have airport outlets with English-speaking employees).

SIM cards for various countries can also be bought from American suppliers, including Telestial, but expect to pay more for the card and its use than you would if you were to buy it in your destination country.

For example, one Telestial SIM card option charges users 84 cents for the first minute of outgoing voice calls, while outgoing texts cost 69 cents. Data costs 49 cents per megabyte from Britain (double the ATT package price) and a whopping $15 per megabyte from Israel and Russia.

Still, depending on the country and your American mobile carrier’s rates, buying a local SIM card may prove cheaper than the roaming rates you will pay your carrier.

Trying to find out the cost of a local SIM card and phone charges can be a challenge, though, even if you speak the language. I called two cellular carriers in Britain, Orange and Vodafone, to ask about rates. After waiting 10 minutes on hold at Vodafone, I was cut off in midsentence.

The man I spoke to in Orange customer service had no idea how much data I would use for particular applications. “I cannot say,” he said. “It depends on how long it takes to open the e-mail and the quality of the connection.” He advised that I ask about costs when I arrived in London.

One SIM card caveat: if you love the romantic idea of having your own Turkish or Swedish or Italian phone number and decide to go the SIM card route, make sure that your friends and family back in the States have an international calling plan of their own.

When my wife and I traveled to New Zealand, a family member in the United States spent $25 for a five-minute call to our local Auckland number because she had never signed up for reduced overseas calling with ATT.

MY PHONE IS LOCKED Ask your carrier to unlock your phone. ATT will unlock your phone when your contract is up. T-Mobile will do so after 40 days of service, or 18 months if you are under a two-year contract. Verizon, which uses the CDMA standard, sells 20 models of “world phones” that have SIM cards for use overseas; typically, those phones are unlocked out of the box.

If your carrier will not unlock your phone, you can do it yourself, with one exception: according to a ruling last year by the United States Copyright Office, phones bought after Jan. 26, 2013, may legally be unlocked only by your mobile company.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/30/technology/personaltech/packages-lower-cost-of-travel-with-a-cellphone.html?partner=rss&emc=rss