On 2007-04-12, DTC <no_spam@move_along_folks.foob> wrote:
> One of my customers is going to Spain for two weeks in about two or three
> weeks and wants to use her Cingular phone and I really didn't want to jump
> into any mis-informed suggestions. I'll ask if she is looking more towards
> using her phone for local calls or to call back to the states (which I
> suspect is what she intends to do).
Roaming in Spain is $0.99 with Cingular World Traveler on the account,
$1.29 otherwise. The price is fixed for incoming and outgoing calls,
both local and to the US.
For two weeks she's almost certainly better off with a local SIM if
she is going to be using the phone more than a bit. The two mobile
companies I remember there are
http://www.movistar.es http://www.vodafone.es
though there's at least one other one. If she needs to keep her US
number alive forwarding to the incoming number of a VoIP service and
then forwarding the service to the Spanish mobile is one way to
do this (I use Skype for this; forwarding to a Spanish mobile is 27
cents/minute) if she has an account somewhere already. If not, though,
even the 34 cents/minute Cingular World Connect rate is cheap enough that
forwarding directly to the Spanish mobile (incoming calls will be free)
is better than roaming.
For calling back to the US, if she buys a local SIM she should ask
if they have any cheap add-on packages for US calls. I've gotten
good rates to the US on prepaid SIMs in the UK and Germany fairly
recently.
Dennis Ferguson
Cingular in Spain advice 
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