Hi,
I have an unlocked e61 with 2gb and I am using Opera Mobile. I am heading to Turkey, Greece and Italy in a few days. My US operator is Cingular and I am set up for international use. I understand that I will have to pay extra for calls and kb's of data regardless of the fact that I have unlimited data in the states.
Does anybody have any experience with accessing service providers in any of these countries? Do I need special settings or configurations? Cingular says I don't but I'd sooner not take a chance. I'm most interested in accessing the data portion (www) to check my email.
Any help is greatly appreciated.
Regards,
Lyle
In Italy, yes. No, is not necessary nothing special - Vodafone.
At least in my case (Swiss operator) roaming (voice and data) has never been a problem lately when travelling in Greece and other European countries. However, they rip you off, roaming costs are generally very high, make sure you know the price tag and how much you consume (disable checking emails every 5 minutes etc.). Happy journey though.
If you are planning to do some surfing while in greece / italy I strongly suggest that you turn images off.
Roaming charges can be astronomical - I have heard of people running up bills of hundreds of dollars in a short time.
If you can avoid roaming I would, European phone network roaming charges are VERY high. In fact they're so high that the European Commission launched an investigation into price gouging and concluded the prices were a rip-off. They're going to force network operators to cut their charges, but the new laws won't come into force until some time in 2007:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4696494.stm
The network operators like to fleece people through roaming because most travellers are still unaware of just how high the charges are when they're abroad. These roaming charges bear no relation to the actual cost of connecting a call or transferring data, they're there just to make huge profits for the networks.
The E61 has wi-fi so if you can try to use hotspots, even ones you have to pay to use, that will probably work out much cheaper than using data by roaming on a foreign phone network.
Thank you all for your comments. So here's the deal from the US. As a Cingular customer I have 2 options for voice calls. The non-contract costs me $1.29 US per minute for calls in Greece & Italy. Data is $ .02 per kb or $20.48 per mb which is a rip off. Thanks for the warning. Knowing that I have the potential of being hosed, I have disabled images in Opera Mobile which works fine except for my company portal.
I did a check after restting my packet data counters and found that it will cost me about $10 a day to check my 2 personal email address and my corporate box.
I think I'll keep my eyes open and my Hotspot finder on my e61 switched on as much as I can.
Again, thank you one and all.
Lyle