Mobile Phone use in Florida

[signtalker]

Do any of you take your mobile phones on holiday with you?, if so is it expensive to use them out there?. Me and DH were considering this, as we have a day when im solely on my own with DS and we need to keep intouch(for emergencies I suppose).Is this a good option, or is there another way?.

Jules

 

[Muppet]

We always take our phones with us. I used it loads to call home and Nic (my chap) whie we were there. If I was shopping and Nic was doing business it was the easiest way to communicate.

We don't find it expensive, but make sure you call your service provider to activate the international traveller service as this greatly reduces calls. My bill for 2 weeks was, £2.00 for traveller service, £45 for calls, this included 10 minutes us calls - to Nic and 35 minutes to UK.

 

[BevS97]

you have to have a special phone in order to use it in the us, I think it's called a tri-band.

If you don't have one of these, you can rent US mobile phones at the airport, or buy a cheap one at Walmart.

bev

 

[Kermits Krew]

It's easy peasy to take your phone abroad with you. All you need to do is ring up your phone operator (T-Mobile, Vodafone or whoever) and ask then if they can add international roaming to your phone. It takes about 5 mins to do. Then your phone will work almost anywhere in the world, including Florida.

It will be more expensive than using it at home, but it isn't to much (I think mine was 15p a minute). You can always ask the operators how much it will cost before you ask them to add international uage to your phone.

Have a nice trip!

H x

 

[UKDEB]

We took phones with us for the first time last October so we could stay in touch with the kids. As others have mentioned, you have to ask your provider to activate the International Roaming facility - this is just so that the phone will be operational. O2 also provide a service (and I imagine the other providers do too) whereby you pay a monthly fee (£3 from memory) and get a reduced tariff on calls. Once you return you simply cancel the facility - in fact O2 diarised it themselves and cancelled it automatically. The calls are still expensive, however, and you pay both to send <i>and</i> receive calls. The cheapest option is to text, although the service isn't available on all networks in the US and your phone will just pick up networks at random, so you have no control over it.

The phones must be tri-band as the US uses different frequencies to those used in the UK.

We noticed that the different voltages played havoc with the charger, although it did seem to sort itself out eventually some time after we returned home.

 

[psharrock]

Is there such as thing as pay as you go in America.

Ie could you buy a US SIM and use that for the duration of the holiday.

The roaming charges are very expensive
On Orange to make a call is just over £1/min and to receive a call is approx 70p/min.

You could forward your UK number to the american number and the call charges would be much less than 70p/min


Paul

 

[Bexx]

Here's a thread mentioning TracFone which is an American Pay-as-you-go. Hope the link works.

http://disboards.com/showthread.php?threadid=227584&highlight=Tracfone