Frequent business traveller or just headed for a week on the French riviera? Either way, often-extortionate roaming fees are sure to cut into your budget - or are they now?
Most of us have been there at some point; after a long and arduous flight (depending on your intake of inebriating substances), you arrive on foreign shores and make a few quick calls to let everyone know you arrived safe and sound. The next days whiz by as in a blur, and since you've decided you're not going to worry about anything at all while you're on vacation, the thought of your phone bill is but a mere spectral entity banished to the outback of your consciousness. Then, you get back home - where the shock of a lifetime awaits.
Lesson one: Evasion
For those on GSM networks, reducing or entirely avoiding stroke-inducing roaming fees might be easier than you could have imagined. Courtesy of easily interchangeable Subscriber Identity Modules, or SIM cards, stopping by a local handset vendor and getting a prepaid card from a local operator for a handset you already own easily cuts bills for calling back home in half or more - and if you're travelling with a larger party, there's even larger savings to be had if everyone gets on the bandwagon.
Unfortunately, a tactic commonly employed by operators known as an operator lock could throw a wrench into things. Originally devised to prevent subscribers from jumping ship once they've bought a subsidized handset, it also blocks the scenario as described above - yet there's still hope. European carriers in general have strict policies regarding unlocking handsets prior to the expiration of 12- or 24-month agreements, but most willingly cooperate thereafter.
Carriers in the US appear to be more lenient, meanwhile, with T-Mobile earning five out of five stars for its willingness to unlock customers that have been paying their bills for the last 90 days. Cingular Wireless, on the other hand, will unlock handsets on a case-by-case basis although its requirements appear to be a tad on the fuzzy side as gleaned from numerous online forums - while former AT&T Wireless customers are left out in the cold. Of course, a large number of US citiziens rely on CDMA carriers such as Sprint and Verizon for their mobile phone needs, whose handsets are incompatible with GSM networks which means roaming is technologically impossible in all of Europe and large parts of the Asia Pacific. Then what?
Lesson two: Infiltrate
One method of avoiding the CDMA quandry is simply to buy a GSM handset from a local vendor. Unfortunately, the cheapest ones typically come with 12- or 24-month subscription plans like those mentioned above, which means you'll likely end up paying more than you save. Plan B: pick up a used handset on eBay - just make sure it's operator unlocked. Naturally, this also works if you're already on a GSM subscription plan and your operator isn't beeing cooperative.
Lesson three: Evade
If all else fails, break the rules. At long last, Wi-Fi phones are finally starting to trickle onto shelves with Skype being the favoured service at the time of writing. With a handset such as the
IPEVO Fly-1, a Windows Mobile device running the Skype client or simply a laptop, hotspot access at hotels and the likes costs considerably less than mobile phone calls - but you can only call other Skype users. Lucky bastards living in the US, however, can for a small added fee take advantage of the Skype Out service, which lets you dial out to any land line in the US at local rates and not just other Skype users. At any rate, it beats having to install Skype on grandma and grandpa's Pentium II.
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