by Kimberly Munsey-Carlton

Created on: January 30, 2008

Knowing before you are going is the key to avoiding high bills while traveling abroad with your domestic phone. While it is comforting to take your familiar personal device with you as you travel abroad, financially it can be a disaster if you have not communicated your intent with your carrier and verified the costs, coverage and procedures involved with using your cell phone internationally.

After making certain that your device has the bandwidth available in the country you are going to, determine if it would benefit you to receive the SIM Subsidy Unlock Code for your device. This can allow you to purchase a prepaid, temporary SIM from the country you are going to. This works well if you are visiting family and friends there with local numbers or if you are calling lots of local hotels or sites. It does not work out well if friends in your home country need to reach you since you will be assigned a local number for the country you are visiting. You can carry both SIM cards with you, swapping out for whatever needs you have. A caveat on this is to remember that your SIM is as valuable and useful to a thief as a credit card, so protect it as such.

If you have decided that it is not worth the hassle of a foreign SIM and unlock, which may not come without a fee, the next stop is calling your carrier or visiting their website. Do you need to have your account provisioned with roaming permissions so that the towers your carrier has agreements with in that country will allow you to use their towers? You may have local or nationwide permissions but you may not have roaming permissions.

How much does it cost per minute and per text? Calls can range from 0.49 per minute to 5.99 per minute. Be sure and tell them if your travel involves a cruise ship, whose prices are quite extreme. Text messaging can be a less expensive way to let the folks back home know you are safe and missing them. Texting, especially picture messaging however can be unreliable internationally since it travels through many towers and carriers to reach its destination and other than Internet is the most problematic while traveling.

If the country you are going to supports Internet on a cell phone then remember that Internet, e-mail, any kind of data, can be charged fees of at least $15.00 per megabyte to retrieve and download abroad. This is much harder to keep track of than minutes. Check to see if your carrier has a feature you can use while traveling to give you a blanket cost on this use.

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