Is it free to receive calls on US PAYG Sim in US?

paul2468

The carphone wharehouse do a mobile world simm for about £5...this lets you call any mobile or landline for 5p per min in America or Canada. you can also pick up the simm cards on ebay for about £2.

System

I know that US networks place lots of restrictions on their pre-paid services, so as the previous poster says, you may not have GPRS access with a US prepaid sim at all!

The smsbug service would only really be worthwhile when using a UK sim in the USA, either contract or prepaid.When I use Virgin when roaming, my texts incur a data charge of 1p per time (from virgin), and are about 2p each (from smsbug). Bringing the total cost per message to 3/4p to send, and they are free to recieve.

As far as I can tell, all the UK networks let you use GPRS when roaming on Cingular/T-Mobile USA which are the two main ones. T-Mobile USA (1900) would give you full coverage with a triband phone from here, whilst Cingular would give you coverage with a tri-band (1900), they also have additional coverage which requires a quad band phone(850/1900).

See these maps:

http://www.gsmworld.com/cgi-bin/ni_map.pl?cc=us&net=we (T-Mobile 1900)
http://www.gsmworld.com/cgi-bin/ni_map.pl?cc=us&net=be (Cingular 1900)
http://www.gsmworld.com/cgi-bin/ni_map.pl?cc=us&net=b2 (Cingular 850)

As you haven't said where in the US you are going, it may be worth checking the T-mobile USA/ Cingular websites to see about coverage. They will normally ask you to put in a ZIP code for the location.

Sorry, if thats all a bit nerdy!

Flashfly

Heng_Leng wrote:

Sorry, if thats all a bit nerdy!

lol! Not nerdy at all! Two days ago it would have been, but it is amazing what you can learn about mobiles in such a short time.

I should have said I'm off to the Phoenix area and will be pretty much based there for the whole five months.

Flashfly

Now this is just getting too confusing.

I went into the Carphonewarehouse store today and asked about their O2 tariffs for texting when in the USA. The lady I spoke to was really nice and in a hushed voice said to me, "Don't use your mobile at all in the States. It'll cost you a fortune, even if you only use it for texts, due to roaming charges that are applied."

I was under the impression that if I received texts then it would be free. Was this assistant mis-informed?

Thanks, and Happy New Year!