A couple of weeks ago I went acros the "pond" to the UK on business. beforehand I did some research to find a cost effective way to use my cell phone abroad. I started with my current provider, AT&T, to see what packages they have. I needed the ability to make both voice and data calls. As far as I could find I could get a plan ($6/month) that reduced my voice costs from $1.29/min to $0.99/min. This rate seemed to be irrespective of whether I was calling locally abroad or home to the US. If I paid $25/month I could use up to 20MB of data a month, with a reduced rate per kB above that.
I then looked at some of the pay as you go plans in the UK. I only looked at the Big 4 providers, not any of the myriad of smaller PAYG services available. The best deals seemd to be withT-Mobile and Orange, the former being the one that fnally worked out best for me. I put GBP20 on a SIM picked up at a local cellphone store after arrival in the UK. This allowed me to buy a package of 120 minutes of US/Canada calls for GBP 7.50. this equates to 10 US cents per minute, much better than the $0.99 AT&T wanted. In fact the US calsl are cheaper than the UK calls, which were being charged at 10p per minute after the first 2 minutes (@ 20p).
It also provided me with 5 days of "unlimited" data access, technically T-Mobile (and all the other Big4 providers) seem to cap you at 25MB per day. No financial penalty for exceeding the cap at T-Mobile, but they reserve the right to throttle your usage. I could also buy extra days of data, GBP1 at a time, or GBP2.50 for 5 days. I got 5 free international texts, but was paying a relative low amount for both local and international SMS messages outside of the "gift".
To be able to use the "foreign" SIM card, I needed to unlock my phone. This was doen easily by calling ATT customer service, who walked me through the process. The most difficult thing was finding a non ATT SIM card, which is needed to initiate the process. I would obviuosly have one in the UK, but I wanted to carry out the unlocking before leaving the US, in case I needed to conatct technical support. Luckily a colleague lent me his card (Sprint from a Blackberry) and the actual unlocling only took a few minutes. If you have not been withe your provider for long enough (6 months to 1 year) there are also companies on the web who will provie the unlock code for a small fee, just Google "unlock GSM".
After a week in the UK, I still have over GBP5 on my card for local calls and more than 60 minutes in my international package. I will be returning in a couple of weeks so will find out soon how long the packages iare valid. But even if I have to put more money on the card for my next visit it is stiall a lot cheaper than anything AT&T had to offer.
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)