When you go on holiday or working abroad you’ve got a couple of options for keeping in touch. You can either take your own mobile and keep every conversation really short, or you can buy a SIM card for a local network from eBay, unlock your phone, stick the SIM in, register it to some local address, then pop into a shop somewhere every few days to top it up.
There’s other problems of course, like the fact that your mobile provider will charge you a gerzillion pounds for your picture messages and – if you’re mad enough – internet access. If you do try the “local SIM card route” then you can be faffing about for ages to try and send that all-important picture of you lounging by the pool back home.
There’s a few other possibilities of course – you can hunt down a WiFi point and do some Skype calls, possibly even VoIP if you’re feeling adventourous. We tried something rather weird last year in Barcelona which worked, but was a pain to setup.
So, if you, like me, need to run around Barcelona and update a website instantly with all the latest gossip.. are there other ways to keep you connected without remortgaging your house or fiddling about with foreign SIM ?
Well, it turns out that there is. We were pointed at Me Mobile, a company that rent mobile phones, mobile dongles, SIM cards and lots more. It aimed at the Spanish market mainly, and – for example – you can rent a Nokia handset with 20 Euros of credit for 7 days for €32. Stick that in your bag and call people using the “Mas Mobile” network, which piggy-backs the Orange network in Spain. All the calls you receive are free, as are texts, and you can call a UK landline from it from as little as 7 cents per minute. Oh, and if you do need a little extra then MeMobile offer a top-up function so you don’t need to keep popping to the local shops.
If you’ve gone abroad and found another way to get around the age-old “roaming rip off” problem, do let us know.
Link – MeMobile
using a rented mobile dongle with personal wifi capabilities could mean you have full data access with your OWN smartphone (upto the prescribed data allowance).
Using skype and other IM solutions you can stay in touch for a simple fixed fee.
This led me to thinking… why DO phones NEED to send their texts across the GSM network when, in reality those texts are reaching a data server at the other end, so why not have the phone auto-select the route to deliver the texts?
As an example with the browser on a phone, it doesn’t care if it retrieves the page via the 3G network or wifi, so why is a text (and a regular phone call itself!) restricted to the phone network?
if im in america and want to ring a landline in the uk how do i do it