Telephoning in Germany - here's a good idea...

[Jörg Fischer]

Telephoning with a foreign cell phone over here in Germany is rather expensive. Also when your family calls you from home in Germany, since there are high roaming fees.

There is an efficient and cheap way to telephone withing Germany: they sell "prepaid-cell-phones" over here for about 25,- Euros. For example this Nokia 1616 for 22,- Euro -> www.t-mobile.de/shop/handy/0,4855,2963-_52596-0-9853;CNC-0,00.html

You receive a cell phone with SIM-card and a German phone number and 5,- Euro credit (balance), so you can make cheap phonecalls within the german telephone network. And calls from your home to a German cell phone are usually also a lot cheaper than to a foreign cell phone used in Germany (with roaming fees etc.)

And of course it's a lot cheaper if Americans, Norwegians, etc. can call each other with their German cell phones than with their foreign ones...

When you go back to your country, you can keep the German cell phone (since it is yours). It is SIM-locked, but one is allowed to legally unlock it after one year.

If you are interested, I will help you getting a German prepaid-cell phone.

Regards

Jörg

[Lee Hedges]

That's a GREAT idea, Jorg! We can collect phone #s from the people driving into one list and share it so everyone can have direct access to T34 friends during the adventure. Can you purchase one for me with a reasonable amount of call-time? I'd love to use PayPal + fee to cover the costs if that works for you.

[Jörg Fischer]

...another idea would be if you bring an "older" (own) cell phone which works in the German (European) standard, I can just get a SIM card.

A SIM-Card with a credit of 10 € and 100 free minutes included costs only 10€, and 1 minute phoning (to another German phone) is abou 5...15 €-cent.

I just found a special offer from Discotel: a prepaid Simcard with 45 Euro (!) start credit for telephoning only costs 4.95 Euro (http://www.discotel.de/tariffs/), phone calls then are 7.5 Euro-cent per minute, so for about 5 Euro one can phone 600 minutes.

Sure, with this special offer they want you to stay by their company for many years once you have the SIM-card and this numbers. But this is a great offer for "limited use"...

Lee, for you I already have a cell phone (my spare phone) which I wanted to give you once you are here. So my calls to you are also cheaper then

Regards

Jörg

[Lee Hedges]

Excellent plan, Jorg!
How would we know if our old phone works in the European standard?

[Jörg Fischer]

When I got this right (I am not a cell phone expert) over here we use the GSM-900 and GSM-1800 standard (see here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM_frequency_bands ), whereas in the US it's GSM-1900.

Anybody can confirm this?

Regards

Jörg

(I'm on holiday from July 2 - 13, 2011)

[Tom Reay]

We have the Droid Global phone -
the rates with Verizion are $1.00/minute for voice.
.15 / text message out and .05 for text received.
I'll probably be texting a lot

[Jörg Fischer]

Telephoning within Germany with German cell phone is 0.08...0.10 Euro per minute. And it's usually also cheaper if your folks from home call a German cell phone than your home cell phone abroad.

If you need/want a SIM-card, I can get you one and give it to you on Thursday afternoon, Aug. 11.

Jörg