Extracted from a post on the FlyerTalk Travel Technology forum:
I have a Nokia E61 sect-band (800/900/1800/1900/2100mhz) phone with wifi. On the wifi side, I signed up for a free account with truphone.com which has free calls to the US until the end of the year. Where I am on wifi, I'll call free. Where I am off wifi, I can pretty much roam anywhere. Underneath the dashes is a solution I am using when I am in Europe or most of Asia. I originally posted it to a different thread so it might seem a little non-responsive.
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I have skimmed through the past eleven pages of the forum post, but if I am hitting things previously covered please excuse me. I travel a great deal and just wanted to share my solutions.
I have a Cingular with their Global Blackberry plan which gives me unlimited Blackberry data access all around the world. I also pay Cingular $2.99 a month for a feature called fast forward which gives me unlimited domestic call forwarding. When I jump on a plane, I literally forward my calls just before the cabin doors shut.
When I get on a European bound plane, I pack a second phone which is basic quad band unlocked phone. I have a Riiing SIM like the prior posters. I purchased for $1 a month a US 800 number from callbackworld.com that forwards to my Riiing SIM at US$0.14 a minute. I also normally use their callback service. I trigger their callback service using my Cingular phone. This permits me to make outgoing calls to the States at $0.14 a minute.
Something prior posters have not focused on is the cost of voicemail when abroad. There is a little covered “gotcha” here. When you are standing in Europe and miss a call or are on the phone, the call gets routed back to the US on a conditional call divert. This means that you are billed for a call to Europe and back again or double the roaming rates. Most people don’t want to turn off their voicemail which means that the carrier charges you at least double for these calls. When I was in Africa, I once got nailed with $15 voicemails -- $5 to call Africa, $5 to forward the call back to the States, and $5 to retrieve the message. I was hit with these charges even when my phone was shut off because I had registered on the Tanzania network and carriers generally hold on to your registration.
Riiing coupled with callbackworld has changed my roaming rates hugely. I used to buy prepaid SIMs for the major countries I visited. I found that despite the slight inconvenience of the callback, this approach is worth it.
I also use a Nokia E61 (not an E62) as my Blackberry (connect) device. It has built in wifi and a voip client. Where I am in a wifi zone, I can make free calls. It is also possible to receive free calls, but that requires more tinkering if you want to always be reached at one number.
By the way, checkout prepaidgsm.net. It is a forum which specializes in roaming on the cheap. Prepaidgsm was favorably cited in a recent EU report criticizing the rates charged for international roaming.
--Dubai Stu
2 comments:
I recently traveled the Caribbean with a truphone and got no bill at all as I stayed with the phone within the WiFi range of the three hotels I stayed at. WiFi was free of charge on St. Barth and I found it so useful to use truphone. Orange my operator from the UK who also exist on St. Barth would have charged me more than 1 Euro / minute. I believe I was some 400 minutes on the phone. A masive saving. I also enjoyed the call quality and the fact that people back home could reach me on my truphone number, without me having to pay roaming charges on the forward leg. I used to have various SIMS but it somehow is not practicle as you need to change your number. I am now using only my truphone number as my main number. I even put a picture on Flickr truphone 'ing from the pool at Hotel La Banane. The hotel operator should keep the free WiFi as an incentive to stay. What a liberating experience.
In the interests of disclosure, since alexanderstraub's comment reads just a bit like an advertisement, his bio includes:
"He recently co-founded the world’s first 4G network operator ((truphone))"
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