At 06 Apr 2007 12:04:44 -0700 Robert A. Fink, M. D. wrote:
> We are going to be spending a week in Cancun, Mexico, in mid-May. My
> wife and I both have Cingular phones (RAZR with GSM) which include
> "International access" and GPRS/EDGE for my laptop.


What is "international access?" Is that a plan, or does that just mean
int'l roaming has been enabled on your account?

Cingular has a "Cingular Mexico" voice-plan add-on for $5/month that
drops the roaming rate from $0.99/min to $0.59. Data is a killer,
however- it's $20/MB. Cingular does offer a "DataConnect North American"
data plan for $109/month that's unlimited in the US and gives you
100MB/month in Canada and Mexico, but it requires a year committment
according to the website.

I visited Cancun in January. I'm with T-Mobile, who charges $1.49/voice
minute and $15/MB of data. I put a T-Mo prepaid SIM in my phone (unlike
most prepaids T-Mo's can roam internationally) since I had a leftover
prepaid my wife used to use before we went to a family plan, so I figured
I'd burn up the leftover prepaid balance rather than add new charges to
my account at $1.49/minute. It also helped to avoid the "forward
effect" (once your phone registers on a foreign carrier, you get charged
a minute for all incoming calls you don't answer or that go to voice
mail, even if your phone is turned off since your carrier forwards the
call to the operator you were last registered on.)

It was kind of nice not to carry the phone around for a week- I used a
minute or two every other day to check messages on my "real" line.

> What, if anything, do I have to do before we leave in order to be able
> to:
>
> 1. Place and receive calls on our phones

Just tell Cingular to activate int'l roaming (it sounds like you already
have.)


> 2. Use my laptop connect card for Internet access.

Same- just tell Cingular to activate data roaming on that account, and
repeat "$20 a megabyte" to yourself while you use it. I left the laptop
at home and used my hotel's generous $7 for 15 minutes, $11 for 30
broadband on my wi-fi-enabled PDA phone for checking e-mail and light
browsing. (The time lasted for a 24-hour period, so I'd log on and buy
15 or 30 minutes time at 8 or 9pm, download my e-mail, log off, compose
replies off-line, log on and send, log off, and do the same the next
night an hour earlier (23 hours ito my 24-hour day) to get two-day's e-
mail for my 7 bucks.

> Any ideas of what kind of speed I can expect from Cancun?

Telcel has EDGE, so 150-200k probably. IIRC, Movistar, the carrier T-Mo
prepaid roams on in Cancun only had GPRS- I don't ever remember the EDGE
indicator ever lighting up on my phone- just the "G" for GPRS.