Roaming in India

[mattglobal]

Hi everyone,

I'll be in India for a few days and wanted to see what worked best for those of you who have been. Did you get better service on CDMA or GSM and what carrier, if any, seemed to be more reliable?

Thanks.

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[mattglobal]

When I landed, I had my phone set to Global, and was shifting between 1X and 1x with relatively poor service. I switched to GSM/UMTS and am getting pretty good coverage on Vodafone IN.

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[raino]

As far as I know, most of the carriers are GSM in India, on 2G. 3G is available but pretty spotty. They almost all use the 2100 MHz frequency.

[mattglobal]

Originally Posted by raino

As far as I know, most of the carriers are GSM in India, on 2G. 3G is available but pretty spotty. They almost all use the 2100 MHz frequency.

Yeah, parts of Asia throw me for a loop. I saw that India had CDMA coverage, but it was much spottier than the UMTS coverage I got with Vodafone IN, and even that got dropped, switching to another carrier with which I could only get edge.

Beijing was the opposite: couldn't connect to a GSM carrier at all. I would start out at 1X but if the signal wavered at all, I would drop to 1x and have to turn off and on the network in order to get data coverage again.

In Hong Kong and Macau, I didn't bother with trying the CDMA carriers. Coverage was excellent on CSL in HK and SmarTone in Macau.

Same story in Japan: haven't bothered trying CDMA. Great coverage on Softbank, as always.

[Filth.Injector]

Yea we use GSM/UMTS ere.. as long as you are in any of the main cities like Delhi, Bombay, Bangalore, Chennai, Calcutta, you should get 3G connectivity over Vodafone or Airtel the main Carriers.

[Artemis68]

Definitely get a cheap local SIM card from Airtel or Vodafone. I would say that's the best way to get coverage and have it be cheap.

Sent from my VZW Thunderbolt.

[BDKira]

Anyone of you got a BB from Verizon working fine on a GSM network overseas? Or did you'll have to ask a rep to "unlock" ur pin??

[redhalo79]

They would have to unlock the phone since it wont work in India or any other GSM ccountry for that matter without it costing A LOT of $$$.

[Artemis68]

You need to make sure that the BB (or any phone for that matter) that you purchase from VZW is a "global phone". Global phones have SIM card slots that can be unlocked for international use, so you can put local SIM cards in there.

If you do not have a global phone, then I suggest you get a cheap unlocked GSM phone for your trip.