Robert Livingston wrote: > Be careful if you cross over into the Gulf Islands. > > > > The Canadian cell company (Rogers) will charge you more than the cost of > your iPhone for not that much access time. The rates are astronomical. > You may be used to the fixed rates that you get with AT&T here but cross > the border and it is a different story. > > There is more awareness of this problem now, and the iPhone itself can > be set not to grab data in Canada, but the first time I used my iPhone > in Canada I naively got on-line to read the newspaper and download a > couple pictures while in a long border crossing line up. As I just recently traveled to Rome, Italy and Addis Ababa, Ethiopia I was pretty aware of this. While SMS rates in many parts of the world are significantly less than in the U.S. (1 cent per message in the Philippines) data rates can be astronomical. In Ethiopia, the recommended solutions for this is to get a SIM card from the local carrier and, in fact, there are several places where one can rent a sim card for a week. I brought along my "old" phone (a Blackberry Pearl) and planned on renting a sim card for it but was never able to make it to the place where they rented them so most of my communication home was via email. In most places in Africa, mobile phone users do not get 1-2 year service plans but instead get their sim cards loaded with pre-paid "minutes", or can buy sim cards with a number of minutes already on them. In some countries mobile phone minutes have become a commodity. In Kenya, for example, you can get into a taxi cab and use SMS to transfer some of your cell phone minutes to pay the cab fare to the driver. *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List - Any opinions or suggestions expressed here are solely those of the writer(s). You must assume the entire responsibility for reliance upon them. All postings copyright the author. Submissions: PaddleWise_at_PaddleWise.net Subscriptions: PaddleWise-request_at_PaddleWise.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************Received on Sat Apr 25 2009 - 05:06:42 PDT
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