Cell Phones in Europe: 2007 & 2008
Here's a quick tour of what Bill learned about economizing when using a cell
phone (or "handy") in Europe. He was shopping specifically for phones and
services for making domestic cell phone calls within Italy and Germany. The
original shopping was done expecting to only make a few calls per month but of
course, once we had the phones in hand, they were used more than that. If you
are going to be primarily in 1 country with a fixed address, then some of this
information will likely be off the mark for you.
The Phone
GSM Compatible
Your mobile phone must work on the GSM band system to
work in Europe. Many phones in the US operate on another system, so be
sure you get (or have) a GSM phone.
Unlocked
You have the potential of saving hundreds of dollars if you buy
an unlocked telephone in the US and bring it to Europe. "Unlocked" means you can put a chip in it once
you arrive in Europe. He didn't go shopping for them, but the cheapest unlocked
phones Bill saw in Europe were over $500 whereas he bought one in the US for
$100.
If you use your own "locked" phone in
Europe (this is the type you would usually get in the US at a discounted price
packaged with phone
service), then you will only be able to make calls through your US
carrier and the price per minute will be prohibitive. Sometimes you can get your US
carrier to unlock the phone for you, but often not.
Quad Band
Quad band phones can be used both in Europe and the US.
If your US phone is dual band, it won't work in Europe. If it is tri band
it might work, depending on which 3 bands you have. If you just want to
use your phone in Europe and not the US, you can get a dual band or tri band
phone with the two European bands.
In summary:
If you want 1 phone to work in both the US and Europe at
the lowest rates,
get a quad band, unlocked, GSM phone. However, this will only work with GSM
networks in the US. In our area - Portland, Oregon - GSM is only supported
by Cingular and T-Mobile. Bill bought us each a new phone on eBay for about
$100 apiece, including shipping, that met these criteria.
The Service
Buying a prepaid "SIM card" allows you to use your
unlocked, US purchased, quad band phone in Europe without cumbersome and
expensive contracts. First shop the big vendors online for the country or
countries where you'll want to use your phone for their SIM card options.
Vodafone, T-Mobile, O2, TIM (Italy), and Orange are
some of the biggies. Shopping online allows you to get up to speed on the
details in English (usually), at your leisure.
When you actually go to buy the
card, you'll likely stand in line at a shop for a long time and take pot-luck on
how fluent your clerk is in English, so it's best to go prepared. In Italy,
Vodafone had a special deal that wasn't advertised online whereas in Germany
T-Mobile was the best choice for us but with no in-store specials. With some pressing, Bill was able to find
entry deals for as little as 6€, which included the
essential SIM card and prepaid minutes. You can expect to walk out of a
dedicated telephone
shop with your card inserted and the phone ready to make calls.
To be on the safe side, top-up your minutes before you
exhaust your prepaid supply. It appears that with some arrangements, that you may lose
your phone number if you completely deplete your account, and then you start
over with standing in line. "Top-up" cards can be
purchased at places other than the phone stores. In Italy, it's the tobacco
kiosks that sell the cards; in Germany we even saw them in vending machines and
at grocery stores. You buy a set amount in Euro's and your per minute rate is
determined by your prior agreement when you purchased the original SIM card.
Take Your Passport
We saw other shoppers fumble the ball by standing in
those long lines only to discover that they couldn't buy that SIM card without
their passport, so take it with you as well as the phone you expect to use.
Don't Leave Town Without Confirming It Works
The first 3 pairs of SIM cards we bought in Europe were
installed by the phone store staff who also confirmed that they worked before we
walked out the door. Then, in a small general electronics shop in the mountains (rather
than a dedicated phone store), I bought a SIM card and was told it would be activated
about 8 pm that evening. We checked it that evening and the next morning and
discovered it did not work. Fortunately, it was both mid-week and we were laying
over for hiking, so could wait for them to repeat their activation process. The
electronics shop clearly was not set-up to do on the spot activations as I was
told it would be another 2 hours when I returned with the non-functioning phone.
So, the moral of the story is to buy your SIM cards 1 or 2
business days before leaving town in case they don't activate the card on
the spot. Had we been down the road when we discovered the problem, we'd
probably just abandoned the chip and bought a new one as the language barrier
would have been insurmountable in solving this problem. I am sure such an
activation problem could only be resolved by the original vendor.
A movable cell tower in Sicily.
2008 Experience in Sicily
Our house was on the market to be sold while we were
in Sicily in the spring of 2008 and we needed very reliable cell phone and
internet contact with our realtor. Getting email every week or 2 and having cell
phone service every day or 2 wasn't good enough so Bill upgraded our technology.
We each had a cell phone for hiking and Bill had a 3rd phone purchased as a
modem for the laptop. We decided to buy service with 3 different companies since
we had 3 phones to increase our odds of getting a signal. Over the course of
more than 2 months in Sicily and covering most of the island, TIM was by far the
most reliable service. We could almost always pick-up a strong signal with TIM
whereas the Vodafone and Wind service was less reliable and often weaker. If you
are in a situation where it is imperative to be able to make or receive calls,
I'd recommend 2 phones with service from 2 different companies. TIM did go down
a couple of times for several hours at a time, so having a backup would be
prudent if you have a high-accountability situation.
International Calls
Emboldened by our success with our new cell phones, we bought
yet another SIM card, this one from Ortel,
which gives
killer rates on international calls from Germany to the US or elsewhere in
Europe. Those calls were 9 cents a minute plus a 15 cent connection fee. Calls
within Germany on this card were higher. For 13€, we received a SIM card to
insert in the phone plus 10€ of calling minutes. We rushed back to our room to
check it out and it was for-real. It does of course require physically removing
the domestic SIM card and swapping it with the Ortel chip, which isn't hard
to do but a nuisance if you are making a lot of calls.
Ortel doesn't operate in Italy--we are guessing because of
Italy's tougher anti-terrorism documentation requirements. But, after too long,
we cracked the code on cheaper international calls from Italy. The trick is to
buy a Wind brand SIM card for your mobile phone, then purchase a separate
calling card for international calls. We bought a "cabina" card--a phone card
suitable for making calls from telephone booths, but one with a special Wind
access number on it. Our calls to the US dropped down to 5 cents a minute by
using the cabina card on our mobile phone with a Wind SIM chip. There was no
charge to our mobile phone--only minutes deducted from the cabina card. Too bad
we only tumbled to this a few days before leaving Italy for the season, but
there is always next year.
Being on a roll, Bill is now boldly looking into using our
cell phone to connect our laptop to the internet for up and downloading emails.
It looks prohibitively expensive and he has just begun the process to determine
if he can make it work with our phones, connectors, software, and service
providers. I'll update this as he learns more.
Other Options
If you are in Europe a relatively short time, getting
set-up with a cell phone isn't likely worth the considerable trouble. When we
inquired in 2001, it was impossible for us to buy a cell phone in Europe without
a European address and the necessary GSM phones weren't available in the US at that
time. Since then, we've noticed a dramatic reduction in the number of pay phones on the
streets because of the increased cell phone ownership.
Calling Cards
Instead of using cell phones the last 6 years, we've used
hotel phones and pay phones with European prepaid land line phone cards to make
our weekly call to our home phone number to update a brief trip report and to
pick-up messages. But using calling cards can be a nightmare.
Few hotels can tell you in advance what they will charge you
for using their phone with a phone card and yet you get a better rate at a hotel
than at a pay phone. Sometimes it's free, other times it is $3-4 for a 10 minute
call using the hotel phone with the phone card (yes, you are paying twice for
the call). Some hotel phone systems won't allow phone cards to
be used at all. Some hotel rooms don't have phones; some are incompatible,
rotary phones.
The price per minute per call varies wildly from pennies a
minute to as much as $1 per minute depending on the country and whether you are
using a pay phone or a hotel room phone. (In Poland we'd have a fist full of
phone cards in hand to make 1 call.) Some countries have 2 different kinds of
phones requiring 2 different kinds of cards. Some phone systems and cards are
incompatible with the key-pad punching we do to access our voice mail system at
home. So, the time and money we've invested in using prepaid land lines has been
considerable and the source of many gray hairs.
Call Shops
One other option is phoning from a call shop. Those are
usually only available in the larger cities and are often within a few blocks of
the main train station. They are especially popular with people making calls to
Africa. They often have very good rates for international calls though their phones aren't always
compatible with our voice mail system. The shops are also good places to buy
land line phone cards.
Hotel Room Phones
For a short trip to Europe, it's easiest to plan on not
making calls back to the States at all and just pay your hotel's rates if you
are calling domestically for the next night's reservations.
Connecting To The Internet
Once back in Italy in October of 2007, Bill was motivated to
again tackle using cell phone services to connect to the internet and he was
successful. It required a phone with GPRS capability, software from the phone
manufacturer, and a cable to connect phone to computer. He bought 15 hours of
internet time for 10€ from his Italian cell phone service provider, Vodafone. The 15
hours must be used within 1 month or are lost. If he goes over the 15 hours, the
hourly rate more than doubles. Each connection is billed for a minimum of 15
minutes. In 2008 he bought 100 hours of internet access from TIM for about 30€.
The technical fiddling to make it work involved
downloading software updates from the phone manufacturer and getting the
phone communicating with the laptop. This technical process was easy, the hard
part was communicating with the Vodafone folks as to what he wanted and what the
issues were--the conversations were a mix of English and Italian. For the risk
of $14, it became easier just to try it.
So, now while in Italy, we can connect our laptop to the
internet anytime we can get a good phone signal, which is often. We sometimes
must hang the phone out the window, because of the thick stone walls and stone
alleyways. The service is however at those slow, dial-up speeds, which is a
major deterrent to surfing when the meter is running. We will use it primary for
up and down loading emails. His next challenge is mastering the translation of
the speedy Italian message on his phone which states how much time he has left
on his internet account before he is billed at a higher rate.
Upon our return to Europe in the spring of 2008 Bill upgraded both his
hardware and software for better access to the internet via cell phone. See the
"Internet Via Cell Phones" file for more detailed information, by country, as we experience
it.
France June 2008
Cell phone service in France was so expensive that we didn't participate.
Orange, which was the best deal in Spain, didn't even sell SIM cards for unlocked
phones in France--we could only sign on with Orange if we bought one of their
phones. The phones were cheap enough, 39€ and 49€ for starters, but we already
had 3 phones and were accustomed to buying a SIM card for 5€ or 10€. Plus the
per minute charge was steep, about .55€/minute.
In Sicily, we'd gotten hooked on cheap cell phone service with TIM, Wind, and
Vodafone and on TIM's relatively cheap rates for connecting to the internet via
cell phone. We were shocked to learn that the
cell-phone-to-the-internet-for-our-laptop service option didn't exist in France
except by buying an Apple I-phone and connecting with Orange. "It's coming" we
were told about generic cell phone-internet connection by the SFR brand. Bill
later read that high speed internet service has recently become available in
French cities but is not available in between--unlike in Sicily.
Our understanding is that the only way we could connect our laptop to the internet via the cell phone services in France is if we were residents with a 1 year cell phone company contract and bought a USB device to plug into our commuter. Instead, we settled on WiFi ('wee-fee' in much of Europe) hotspots for our internet connection for which we paid 15€ for 10 hours of usage over 30 days.
France June 2009
Things changed in 2009--Bill bought SIM card for his unlocked
phone for 15€ from "mobiho" at a "tabac". The card came with written
instructions in English. Calls were 0.39€/minute--time will tell how complete
their service area is.
Croatia 2008 & Montenegro 2009
Croatia
is the cheapest country in which to get going with a cell phone: $5 and no
paperwork, you're out the door with a SIM card for your unlocked phone and 50
minutes of rechargeable voice calling or enough data time to surf or send
emails. In Croatia the SIM card is effectively free and unlike in France,
wanting to transmit data rather than voices doesn't create an obstacle. Italy is
cheaper for doing a lot of online work but getting underway in Croatia is far
simpler.
Promonte was the service we used in Montenegro. It was 5€ to
get a data SIM card and enough time to see how it worked. We then bought the 25€
package and were set for weeks of online work.
