From John Forde, and our friends at International Living
 

I've been looking for a cheap cell phone option that would work here in France but that I could also use in the U.S.

Here's what I've discovered:

BUY AN "UNLOCKED" TRI-BAND GSM PHONE. You get a subsidized rate on a cell phone if you get a local subscription. However, if you're not the type to use your cell phone often--which I'm not--buying a phone WITHOUT a subscription to--and not "locked" to--any particular service and then using pay-per-minute SIM cards can be a better option.

I found a phone here: http://www.ustronics.com/

The prices for tri-bands CAN be high, though, so it's best to shop around.

BUY A SIM CARD AND RECHARGE IT. SIM cards are small chips about the size of your thumbnail. All the European phones use them. They keep track of pre-paid minutes. But they also give you a phone number and keep track of other phone settings. So you can move them from phone to phone.

All cell phone minutes are expensive--around 30 cents/minute local, 65 cents/minute international. But the SIM card minutes are only slightly more so; around 35 cents/minute local and 72 cents/minute international.

But unlike a subscription service, you can carry the unused minutes from month to month. If you don't chat for five or 10 minutes with each cell phone call, you can stretch a 200 minute card out for two to three months at a clip.

Depending on the service and which option you buy, the minutes will expire in anywhere from 3 to 6 months. The more you buy up front, the cheaper the minutes.

You can pre-buy SIM cards--or cards to recharge the SIM you already have--before a trip, depending on which country you're heading to, from sites like this one.

Or you can usually pick them up locally. For instance, here in France, they sell them in "tabacs." Provided you recharge your SIM card before the minutes expire, you can keep the same phone number indefinitely.

USE A CALLBACK SERVICE FROM YOUR CELL PHONE. I also stumbled across some other interesting services for those who want to have easy connections to folks/family in the U.S. The callback services, you might already know. This is where, before you place a call, you dial another number to the service. In turn, it will "call you back" at the phone from which you've placed the call. Then you get a tone which invites you to dial the number of the person you're trying to reach.

Calls from the U.S. to Europe, for instance, are often cheaper than calls from Europe to the U.S. The interesting twist is that you can also use these callback services with your cell phone too.

So a call from, say, the Luxembourg Gardens to your cousin in New Jersey might ordinarily cost you 70 cents a minute. With the callback service, it's only about 32 cents a minute. And since all calls TO European cell phones are usually free, you don't burn up your local minutes by taking the call.

Now, why you'd be on the phone instead of enjoying the gardens, I don't know. But should the need arise, see here: http://www.aitelephone.com/callback.html

This is just one of many services. But it's the one that happened to pop up in Google and looks like it has pretty good rates.

USE A "FOLLOW-ME" SERVICE. Here's another service from the same company. And this one is new to me. Here, they set up an "800" number for you in the U.S. It costs $1 per month to maintain the number, charged to your credit card.

You can designate which phone number you want calls forwarded to. You can change the number at anytime on the Internet (handy if you're on the road going from hotel to hotel or in an area where your mobile phone doesn't work).

If anyone in the U.S.--or wherever you've set up the number--wants to reach you, they simply pick up the phone and dial the 800 number. No pin. No further dialling or codes. The call is automatically forwarded to whichever number you've provided. There are also toll-free base numbers available in the U.K., Ireland, France, and elsewhere.

You can find more info on this here: http://www.aitelephone.com/followme.html

The cost of the call is also charged to your credit card. About 7 cents/minute if the call is forwarded from the U.S. to a land line... and 30 cents/minute if you're having it forwarded to your cell phone.

Here's another service worth looking into, for those who want to make it easier for people in the U.S. to call them cheaply overseas: http://www.bigzoo.com/

From land line to land line, international, you can call from the U.S. to Europe for under 4 cents a minute.