Using your mobile abroad – Another way ?

When you go on holiday or working abroad you’ve got a couple of options for keeping in touch. You can either take your own mobile and keep every conversation really short, or you can buy a SIM card for a local network from eBay, unlock your phone, stick the SIM in, register it to some local address, then pop into a shop somewhere every few days to top it up.

There’s other problems of course, like the fact that your mobile provider will charge you a gerzillion pounds for your picture messages and – if you’re mad enough – internet access. If you do try the “local SIM card route” then you can be faffing about for ages to try and send that all-important picture of you lounging by the pool back home.

There’s a few other possibilities of course – you can hunt down a WiFi point and do some Skype calls, possibly even VoIP if you’re feeling adventourous. We tried something rather weird last year in Barcelona which worked, but was a pain to setup.

So, if you, like me, need to run around Barcelona and update a website instantly with all the latest gossip.. are there other ways to keep you connected without remortgaging your house or fiddling about with foreign SIM ?

Well, it turns out that there is. We were pointed at Me Mobile, a company that rent mobile phones, mobile dongles, SIM cards and lots more. It aimed at the Spanish market mainly, and – for example – you can rent a Nokia handset with 20 Euros of credit for 7 days for €32. Stick that in your bag and call people using the “Mas Mobile” network, which piggy-backs the Orange network in Spain. All the calls you receive are free, as are texts, and you can call a UK landline from it from as little as 7 cents per minute. Oh, and if you do need a little extra then MeMobile offer a top-up function so you don’t need to keep popping to the local shops.

If you’ve gone abroad and found another way to get around the age-old “roaming rip off” problem, do let us know.

Link – MeMobile

Comments (2)

  1. Ian Lowe
  2. Pauljlowe1