|
Post by pim on Dec 3, 2013 22:30:07 GMT 10
Or do what I do whenever I travel overseas: take out your Australian sim card and put it somewhere safe and where you won't mislay it because you'll want to put it back into your phone again when you land back in Australia. Don't just turn off your phone. Remove your sim card. That way there are no expensive updates etc etc
When you're OS, get yourself a cheap unlocked phone. In the UK you can pick one up for £15. Then get a pre-paid sim card from any of the larger supermarket chains. It's a bit laborious because you have to have a hard copy record of all the Australian telephone numbers of people you want to stay in contact with and then you enter those numbers into the new OS handset. Don't make direct dial calls to Australia. That's what Skype is for. Only send sms messages. You'll need to because you'll want to let people at home know your overseas mobile telephone number. Mind you, you can also do that by email ...
At least by getting a cheap phone + local sim card over there you don't have to use those clunky converters to plug in your Australian charger to a foreign power point because you've got a local charger, and secondly the local calls you make over there - and you will - will be a heck of a lot cheaper than using an Australian sim card that gets all your calls routed through Australia.
|
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Dec 4, 2013 17:12:21 GMT 10
Here' my tip for not losing the SIM card ..and let's face it, they are getting smaller! Buy a key tag... You know, the ring with the plastic tag you can open and label. Put your sim inside that and close it. Also, on the ring, attach the pin you use to open the sim drawer or a small paper clip. Most back packs have a clasp,of sorts for securing a set of keys. Great spot for it.
|
|
|
Post by pim on Oct 30, 2014 12:29:37 GMT 10
I'd forgottten about this thread. Having spent 3 months o'seas this year and used a mobile phone (who doesn't!) I'm in a position to make this addendum to the thread:
Before I left last June I bought a Travelsim card from Australia Post for $50. It gives you a telephone number that begins with the country code of +37 which means your call gets routed through one of the three Baltic countries of Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia. The $50 you pay gives you $5 "get started" credit. You load the Travelsim card with credit online and the amount is given in $US. I found it to be not expensive but it was a pain in the butt because if I used it in, say, Holland in order to ring an NL number it was an international call and so my interlocutor also incurred costs. Also - and this was very tedious - when you dialled a number an American-accented recorded message would intone "On your account: X dollars and Y cents". You'd then have to wait for the system to ring you so you knew the number had been called and accepted.
I persisted with it because of the original outlay and also because my partner's phone set up worked much better so hers became the default phone and mine was the standby phone. So basically I worked around the problem rather than solve the problem itself.
In the end I realised that the Travelsim arrangement is only for people who are travelling through lots of countries and not staying long in each one ("What's today? Wednesday? Must be Rome!"). I ended up staying in the UK for 2 months and would have been a lot better off with my original idea of buying a cheap local UK sim card at one of the big supermarket chains.
So if you're planning an o'seas jaunt and you see the publicity in an Australia Post shop about "Bill Shock" for returned travellers who've used their Australian sim cards overseas and how to avoid it with one of their "Travelsim" cards, my advice is to think about the type of trip you're taking. If you're going to spend most of your time in one country then forget about Travelsim, take a cheap unlocked mobile phone, buy a $2 or £2 or two euro sim card over there and away you go. And don't forget if you're making a call home to family here in Oz, use Skype!
|
|