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Going to US for a Week - CELL PHONES
bombardier
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Ok here's the deal. I'm going to be flying through Western USA soon and I'll be there for about a week. I have an iphone 4 with Rogers in Canada right now. What are my options for getting either a temporary cellphone or sim card to stick in my phone while I travel the states? I'll need to be making a lot of phone calls and probably text messages too. Data is less important but would be extremely useful so I could check aviation weather online from anywhere.
I've been told it's as easy as buying prepaid or pay as you go sim cards from basically anywhere. I understand it's probably not going to be terribly cheap, but it might be better than doing a roaming plan with Rogers, right?
Edit: I'll be flying a little cessna down through small airports, I mean. Wi-fi might not be totally available at all of them, but american general aviation airports are infinitely nicer than canada's.
I've been told it's as easy as buying prepaid or pay as you go sim cards from basically anywhere. I understand it's probably not going to be terribly cheap, but it might be better than doing a roaming plan with Rogers, right?
Edit: I'll be flying a little cessna down through small airports, I mean. Wi-fi might not be totally available at all of them, but american general aviation airports are infinitely nicer than canada's.
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Obviously you wouldn't want to do banking or anything, but weather, tourist stuff should be OK.
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Similarly, you can get a cheap Virgin Mobile USA prepaid phone for about that price in many of the same stores, which should come with about a $10 credit on it, which is good for a month, last I remember. Looks like, at the moment, their default plan is $.20/minute, and I think it's $.10 to send or receive a text? I've been in Canada on Virgin Mobile Canada, so I haven't really kept up on what I would be paying if I were actually using the phone right now. No contracts required, and you can activate your phone very quickly. Anyway, Virgin Mobile is usually cheaper than any other provider from what I've heard. Their cheap phones aren't that great, but if you just need something for people to be able to call/text that's easily covered. I honestly don't know a thing about their data plans, since I bought one of their cheapie phones, but I know they have better phones that are useable for data. They seem to have good coverage from my experience, unless maybe you're up in the mountains somewhere, or outside the US for a while (there's no roaming at all, your phone just won't work). They use Sprint's network, which is pretty good. Go take a look on their site for more info, although they likely have cheaper options (such as the pay-as-you-go plan that I use and described above) than it shows there.
re the iphone 4, it might me locked to rodgers and even if you have it unlocked, you can't buy prepaid/pay as you go micro sim cards readily in the states. So you would have to trim down a sim card to work in your phone which seems like a lot of trouble.
Your best bet is probably going to be to go to Wal-mart or something and buy a pre-paid bundle - you can usually get a phone+20-30 minutes of talk time for $10-$20. After that you just buy cards and add minutes when you need them.
It looks like Walmart will give you a phone for as cheap as $20 bucks prepaid according to their website, and you can buy cards from there.
Don't know if it goes both ways (Canada -> US), but we did the same thing, and it was $25 or so for the month and calls.
IMHO I would chose ATT especially if you want to use Prepaid data. T-Mobile USA uses a proprietary 3G band so you would be stuck on edge. That being said the two big GSM (actually 1 big now) carriers in the US are AT&T and T-Mobile. either one will give you good phone service ATT will give a much better data experience though.