I've used a pay phone once or twice, even got a phone card on day in Morocco.
I always just supposed that, if we needed a phone for some reason, we would get one of those "burner" cells, like you can pick up at Target or Walmart; a few euro and some minutes and we would be good.
Then... last fall my eight year old flip-phone died. Crapped out. Lost all the contacts, everything.
A flip phone.
It was almost old enough to be hip again, but too old to be very useful or adaptable.
So, don't you know, this was just about the time the new iPhone 6 came out.
I had no working phone for two weeks. So I used the time for a little research, thinking to make a good choice.
I read about GSM phones verses CDMA phones.
The short of it:
The biggest US carriers, Sprint, Verizon, and US Cellular, all use the CDMA standard.
Most the rest of the world uses GSM technology.
Figures. In America, we just go our own way, don't we?
The GSM phone networks in the US. are with T-Mobile and AT&T.
So, we dumped Sprint (after 12 years) and went with T-Mobile.
We are on the "Simple Choice" plan.
It is $100 a month for the two of us, unlimited everything. With taxes here, that is $108 a month total.
You have to buy your own phone. Some phones you can get a price break, but since the iPhone6 was just out, we paid full price. I wanted to get the best phone available at the time, for maximum use, and so we wouldn't have to upgrade for years.
**NOTE** Please don't start in on that stupid "Galaxy vs iPhone" crap... just like the old PC vs. Mac wars, it is totally irrelevant. The point is to spend the money up front on the best, so you don't have to waste money to keep upgrading later.
Anecdotally, on our travels, we see more iPhones than anything else, and thus it is easy to pick up things like chargers on the fly.
Besides, the iPhones are the best, hands down.
The advantage of T-Moblie: it is month-to-month, no long term contract, so I can quit at any time and take my phone with me.
But get this:
And this is the whole point of this post...
I can take this phone to any other GSM country in the world, and on my simple $100 a month plan, use it for unlimited data and texting. It doesn't matter if I am on WiFi or the local cell network.
If I have WiFi available (say in a café, or hotel) I can do unlimited calling anywhere in the world, for free. If I make calls over the local cell network, it costs 20¢ a minute, or I can spend $10 a month (month to month, just when I need it) for like 1000 minutes of overseas calling.
The iPhone automatically seeks out WiFi networks to hook up to, and in fact, most calls I make; everything here at home and at work, are across WiFi.
So, in theory, we will have phones with us this year, and can use them for everything, in Norway, Denmark, Italy, Malta, Austria and Germany... for the regular cost of our home cell plan.
Here is a list of the countries with GSM, in which we can use the phone.
I will let you know in a later post if it really does work out.
*UPDATED 14 June, 2015
Yes, it all works, just as advertised. We are texting and using the internet and apps, and made a call or two. Pretty useful.
To make a call to/from overseas:
To make a call while you are roaming overseas, whether you’re calling within the country or to a location outside it, simply dial "+" and the country code, the city code (if necessary), and the local number.
Rick Steves has a good tutorial, with examples, here.
Here is a full list of country codes, and here are the ones we will be using this summer.
US +1
Italy +39
Germany +49
Austria +43
Norway +47
Denmark +45
Sweden +46
Malta +356