Staying in Touch by Phone Internationally, on the Cheap

The first thing you’ll need is an unlocked mobile phone — that is, a phone that’s not tied to one particular carrier. (In the United States, some carriers will unlock your phone if you ask; abroad, most phones come already unlocked.) Then, whenever you arrive in a new country, you can buy a local SIM card (the tiny, interchangeable chip inside the phone that actually lets you connect to a particular carrier; they’re sold at mobile phone stores and kiosks for $2 to $25, depending on the country) and make phone calls and send text messages without paying exorbitant international roaming fees.

Simple enough. But for folks back home to reach you, you’ll need Skype. In the last few years, Skype has revolutionized how global nomads like myself keep in touch. Install its software on your Mac or PC, and as long as you’ve got an Internet connection, you can make high-quality audio and video calls to other Skype users almost anywhere on earth. (A few countries, like the United Arab Emirates, unfortunately block the service.)

Skype, however, also lets you call out to mobile phones and land lines (a service called SkypeOut) and enables you to have your own phone number in any of 23 countries, including the United States, Hong Kong, France and Italy (this is called SkypeIn).

Both SkypeOut and SkypeIn carry a relatively low fee. SkypeOut calls to land lines can be as little as 2 cents a minute, while calls to mobile phones are usually a bit more. In Italy, for example, Gary’s call cost me (not him) 30.8 cents a minute (not including tax). A SkypeIn subscription, meanwhile, costs $60 a year or $18 for three months. All I have to do before I leave home is set my American cellphone (an older-generation iPhone) to forward to my SkypeIn number, and all I have to do when I arrive in a new country is get a SIM card, go online and set the Skype software’s preferences to forward all calls to the new number.

Two weeks ago, Google announced a new service called Google Voice that operates much like Skype — only cheaper! According to a New York Times article about Google Voice, “calls to international mobile phones are as much as a third cheaper than Skype’s.” Google says the service will be open at first only to users of GrandCentral (a startup Google bought almost two years ago); it will be available to the general public in a few weeks.

http://frugaltraveler.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/24/staying-in-touch-internationally-on-the-cheap/?em