Some time ago, I was in charge of developing a business concern
on the beautiful island of Sri Lanka while based in the United
States. At one point, I needed to send an employee there to set
up the quality control program. This employee did not have a GSM
cell phone so I lent him mine to use “in case of emergency
only”. The employee spent time each night chatting with family
on the cell phone and came back with a $3,000 phone bill in two
short weeks.
If you have a US GSM cell phone and service account, you may
find that it will cost you something in the range of $3 per
minute to use your phone overseas due to international roaming.
As an example, on one trip to Hamburg, I had lost my party at a
very large exposition. I used my cell phone to call them and
found out that instead of it being a local call, it went to the
US and back via their networks thus charging me for two
international calls!
A little while later I was on a plane to Sri Lanka. As we were
about to land, the gentleman next to me took out a small bag and
dumped the contents into his palm. They were SIM chips. I asked
him what this was all about and he told me he was looking for
his chip for Sri Lanka. He informed me that the chip enabled him
to make calls in and from Sri Lanka without incurring the
extremely high roaming charges my friend above met with. He
traveled throughout Europe and Asia and had chips for each major
locale.
I was intrigued by this idea and did some research on what it
took to use these local chips in my cell phone. Here is what I
found:
Your basic cell phone service provider places a unique serial
number into your cell phone. This unique number is called an
“ESN” and it is used by the service provider to identify who you
are. The service provider uses this number to know where to send
phone calls too when someone dials your number.
A GSM phone is a little different animal. “GSM” (Global System
for Mobile Communications) is a type of digital mobile phone
service. GSM is the most common standard for cell phones in the
world. GSM service is common in over 210 countries around the
world with over 1.5 billion users. The popularity of GSM makes
international roaming very common between cell phone operators,
enabling the user to successfully use their phone in many parts
of the world. One of the key differences with GSM is that the
phone itself is not directly linked to you. Rather, the
removable “SIM” (Subscriber Information Module) chip is encoded
with a unique serial number which is what now identifies you to
the wireless provider.
Having your info embedded into a removable SIM chip rather than
into your cell phone is what makes this all so interesting. If
you place your SIM chip into a compatible cell phone, you can
use that phone as your own because the service provider will
recognize the SIM chip inside of it as yours. Conversely, you
can buy compatible SIM chips from the country you are about to
visit and use them in your phone. This is what allows you to
avoid the ugly international roaming charges mentioned above.
Before you can do this, however, you will most likely need to
“Unlock” your cell phone. Most wireless service providers “lock”
their cell phones which means that they program them to only
work with SIM chips issued by their company. Unlocking a cell
phone is basically reversing this programming. The process is
very easy and quick.
There are many service providers online that specialize in
mobile unlocking. Once the cell phone is unlocked, it is
permanently unlocked.
Now I wanted a SIM chip that would work in the country I was
headed too, again, Sri Lanka. I was told that the best way was
to find a cell phone store there in Colombo but this sounded
difficult as my schedule would be very busy. While searching for
an alternative, I was directed to www.Telestial.com as a source
of chips via the internet. I found that I could buy a chip from
Sri Lanka with pre-paid minutes on it. They did also offer a
great variety of SIM chips from most major destinations around
the world. The process was quick and painless and I found the
cost to be very reasonable ($79 vs. $3,000!). The only drawback
to the system was that this did give me a new phone number which
I had to pass out to family and business associates prior to
departure.
The trip went well as I was able to coordinate activities with
local vendors and business associates without feeling like I had
to hang up the phone after two sentences.