July 11, 2005

Some wireless cell plan advice for you canucks going to the US

In preparing to jet away to San Diego again for this years' ESRI UC I decided to make a smart move and pre-purchase some airtime to get a bit of relief on the long distance calls to my cell. Any other Canadians may also wish to look at this to save some coin. If you don't travel or chat much on your cell then you likely don't know what I mean, however, if you've ever come back to a $300 bill just for less than 60 minutes of talking on your cell then you can relate. Some advice.. I'm on a Rogers GSM plan and can prepurchase blocks of 60 minutes for about $40.. 120 minutes for $60... the downside... there's still charges from the roaming provider, so if I'm roaming to AT&T they will be billing me about $1.20 a minute. So... 2 other alternatives are as follows... get a Sim card and pre-paid account from a US carrier like AT&T (I really should do this anyway as I'm in the US roaming a fair bit). The other alternative is to get people to text me instead! When I wear my other hat and attend Nokia and other "wireless" functions as part of managing SymbianOne.com, everyone uses MMS or txt messaging. Unfortunately nobody else in Canada or the US seems comfortable with it... too bad.

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