Hi, I'm a UK based BB user who travels to the US from time to time. After receiving a truly staggering phone bill from my last trip to the states (my provider is Orange) I am investigating cheaper alternatives. My question is this: anybody have any experience of global sim cards? Do they work with BB? Which is the best (cheapest)?
When I first started using the BB service (on windows mobile), I found the costs of using the service for emails while roaming, to be quite cheap.
Here are some quick stats:
- 18 hours in roaming : ~$0.20
- 1 week in vacation: ~$10
Here is a VERY IMPORTANT trick which will reduce your bill heavily:
Turn OFF automatic network selection, and choose your network manually.
If you are moving a lot (car, train, urban area), the phone tends to attach to the network with the strongest signal and often switch from 2G to 3G and so on. Since the billing granularity while roaming is 10Kb / 25 Kb / 100 Kb, everytime that happens, you get billed for that 10/25/100 Kb since the data session resets.
The BlackBerry uses very little traffic in it's own. In my example above, assuming that you use 1Mb/day (which is quite something), imagine what happens if at every 10 Kb used, you are billed for the entire 100 Kb chunk ... you run up a bill very fast.
