Hello!
I'm moving to Karlsruhe in June to write my master's thesis, and naturally I'll be needing a GSM account.
So I'm asking for suggestions for cheap accounts with good coverage and GPRS.
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Hi,
I just bought a T-Mobile Pocket PC. It is locked onto T-Mobile and I want to use it on Cingular Wireless for a couple of days till my number is ported to T-Mobile in the next 5-6 days as I have been told.
Any solutions will be most appreciated but please understand it is a brand new unit I have bought after cooking the ROM on the old Siemens SX-56 still lying with me; and I really really don't want to mess this one up. It has Windows Mobile 2003 edition on it.
Thanks in advance for your help.
Before trying to unlock it, I would check that Cingular are NOT operating on the 850Mhz band in your area as they are in mine (Atlanta) As the XDA is only tri band, it will not work on Cingular's 850 network. Even if there are roaming options in your area, I have found that the Cingular SIM prevents roaming on 1900Mhz, when a native Cingular 850Mhz band is present.
Thanks for the reply. Yups, u're right but I wanted to use the phone in London and its ok since they have a 900Mhz bank there. Also, I spoke to T-Mobile and they will be sending me the unlocking code in 4-5 days, they are more helpful than Cingular in that way.
Ah, London!, my home town!! You may know this already, but in case not, here goes...
Before you go, make sure that T-Mobile USA have your account set up to make international calls. When you get there, you will have to manually change the band on your phone to pick up the 900Mhz band. Once you do that, the phone will probably connect to either the O2 or the Vodaphone network, as T-Mobile operates only on the 800 band over there.... You will of course be hit for some pretty hefty call charges, as all your calls (even to UK numbers) will be treated as international calls. It took me a couple of trips and a couple of $400 - $500 monthly invoices to get wise to what was going on. Then, once I had the phone unlocked, I switched to using an O2 Pay and Go SIM card whenever I am in the UK, leaving a message on my US TMO voice mail with the UK number if someone wanted to reach me. It saved me a lot of money when I finally figured it out.
Re:
Well my friend you saved me the trouble of figuring it out on myself and of course the huge amounts of un-justified spend dollars!!!
Thanks a bundle! I will take your advice and use the pay-to-go cards instead of my T-Mobile service, and leave the voice mail and I can as it is extract the voicemail from anywhere, unlike the Cingular voicemail which you cannot except just from your phone.
Great! glad to help A couple of other things spring to mind...
When you go into the O2 store to get the 'Pay and Go', see if they can also set you up for international calls. Its about a $3.00 one time activation fee. That way you will be able to dial back to the US with the Pay and Go SIM. Rates are about $1.50c a minute. You may have to phone O2 custmer service to activate it, buts its worth the trouble.
O2 will also give you a top up card that you can use at pretty much any gas, sorry, petrol station to top up your pay and go account. Just give the attendant the top up card, a credit card and tell them how much you want to add to your pay and go account. Its pretty slick!
Also, if you need to pull e-mail down from your US e-mail account, you can always just put the T-Mobile SIM back in and connect via GPRS through O2. I believe that there is a data option available with O2 Pay and Go as what they call one of their "bolt ons", but I never managed to get that done on my last trip. Anyway, have a good trip!!
Re:
Thanks a million!
Is there any way of knowing in which countries GPRS will work in? I've got a T-Mobile MDA Vario and on one or two occasions I wasn't able to get GPRS up and running in order to browse the net. Just wondering if it doesn't work in some countries or if that was a coincidence.
Isn't there a list of countries/companies which T-Mobile have roaming agreements with on the T-Mobile website ?
Yes but this only indicates where you can use the phone. My understanding is that this does not necessarily include GPRS/data availability or access.
Yes, just because you can roam does not mean you can use GPRS. I do not think that info is on www.gsm.org either. Drop an email to T-Mobile customer service if it isn't on their site.
Must admit I always buy a local SIM for data usage now that many operators have pre-paid GPRS.
GPRS abroad..
T-Mobile do have partners abroad - for the preferred network to use and cheaper calls - but that doesn't mean you will get any of your GPRS allowance wheilst roaming.
I have the Web'n'walk tariff , but my mobile bill was still over £160 when I got back after a week in Eire.
I think the GPRS / MMS data usage was at their standard roaming tariff.,, whatever that is.
Charlie Grillo
Some examples
I couldn't use GPRS with O2 in UK (where T-Mobile wasn't available). I had no trouble with multiple carriers in Barcelona and always found T-Mobile itself in Frankfurt and Bonn. GRPS works in Paris (didn't note the carrier) and never worked with any of NINE partners in Taiwan last year.
prestonmcafee, thanks for the examples. Your visit to the UK must have been some time ago, T-Mobile exists here now, I think they initially came in the market a couple of years back when they acquired what used to be one to one, or whatever they were called.
Yesterday!
Sorry I wasn't clear, what I meant was that I couldn't get GPRS in the UK in the places where T-Mobile wasn't available; T-Mobile is usually available but not always. Victoria Station and Heathrow have places where T-Mobile's signal is so low that the automatic connection on a US T-Mobile phone connects to O2, and in this case, GPRS will fail.
Sometimes, but not usually, a manual connection would turn up T-mobile even when the phone had connected to O2.
I just returned from 5 weeks in the UK yesterday.
LOL
I have a UK T Mobile Vario, and am taking it with me on my Orlando holiday in a couple of weeks time. I am really wanting to use it to send / receive quick emails.
The plan is to connect to my email, pull down the mail headers and then disconnect. With the mail items I want to read, I go back online and pull the full message down.
I want to drop quick mail messages to friends and family back home, and give certain updates to people on items I have been asked to buy, make sure they are OK with prices etc etc.
There appears to be various mobile cariers in Florida, and am not sure which my phone will connect to when I turn it on, but I know how to manually select a network.
The question is this, the villa is in the Indian Ridge development in Kissimmee, so should I select a specific carrier to get data features, or will any of the available ones allow it?
Vario is Triband so USA is not a problem.
You may be better ringing Tmobile UK and asking them which carrier is cheaper for roaming data in the area you will be travelling to. If you add international option to your account before you go ?3quid or thereabouts, you can get cheaper roaming. It may be cheaper buying a sim in the US and connecting on the local sim.
Maybe our American forum users could suggest the cheapest PAYG options. including data.
I had no coverage problems with tmobile around Orlando earlier this year.
If all else fails, most of the hotels in the area seem to have free, open WiFi
and plenty of parking ;-)
i lived in orlando with t-mobile, and never had any problems with coverage
Hi all,
Will a HTC Hermes purchased in UK work with T-MO USA
Yes as long as it is SIM unlocked.
Info is here http://wiki.xda-developers.com/index.php?pagename=Hermes_SimUnlock
S.K.
Yes
I'm just back from Florida and it worked fine - without unlocking. It picked up T-Mobile USA as soon as I stepped off the plane.
That's very interesting. Do you have any idea yet on charges? Did you use calls and data? It would be handy to know.
My hotel had wi-fi so I used that 99% of the time. I did occasionally use a data connection for e-mail (3G in Orlando area, GPRS some other places, nothing down south!) and the odd text message. No phone calls. Cost me around £5 when my bill came in.
Please note that I have an unlimited data plan in the UK but this does not work abroad. Also, I could not use my BT Zone account (even with partner sites such as t-Mobile) when in the US (my BT Mobilezone or whatever it is called) did not work outside of the UK either).
Still, £5 not bad at all really. Definitely a plus for t-mobile there.
Sorry to burst your bubles but...
1.) MDA Vario II is TOTALLY locked! however Pof's unlocker v3 works great.
2.) T-Mobile USa has Nothing to do with T-Mobile UK, or Germany, or any other T-moblie. None of your plans or minutes cross over, this is true all networks, Orange, Voda, etc.
This is how they screw us to the walls, imagin if they give that up? All those 1.50 GBP per minute roaming fees and 40P texts?
And data, forget about it! Even worse.
(The guy above must have sent like 3.5 texts and mad 1 call)
We may get a break with the EU next summer in Europe, (lower roaming fees, Check out O2 for this)
But you will not get b orderless roaming in your lifetimes, you may get reduced fees, which is a start. But NEVER in the US, there you will get screwed.
The best solutions is to BUY PayGo sim cards, in the US T-mobile is the best for that.
I have a T-Mobile HD2, but T-mobile doesnt workin at my workplace. AT&T works so I was wonderning if I could force a roam. I've tried to manually connect to the network, but network registration fails. Anybody know anything?
Roaming is for countries other than your home country... no operator that I know of lets you roam to their competitors' networks... (apart from operators that own no physical network and have agreements to use other carriers' networks, in which case you can benefit from all... but that's rare).
But...
That is exactly the case with T-Mobile and AT&T. I got to school in Denmark, SC in the country. There I can roam on AT&T cuz theres no T-Mobile tower. When I got home its back to T-Mobile. The only thing I could say is that the roaming could be region or area specific. Could that be the case?
I guess the best way to know is to call TMO and ask...
I roam on AT&T just fine up here (Mendocino County in Northwestern California) in dead spots, and that's in-market where there are also T-Mobile sites. We're a former Edge Wireless market (AT&T Affiliate, taken over by AT&T in April of 2008), and all former Edge Wireless markets have this, we get to use AT&T and T-Mobile's network, I can force (instead of letting it automatically roam over) it to roam on AT&T if I want as well.
force roaming hd2
i have just purchased a hd2 i would like to know nore on this subject since i do not reside in a area that offers descent cell service... i know it is possible on a g1 (my last phone) but would there ve a way to do this on a wm 6.5 fustom rom?? or another ahdroid on for that matter i know nothing has been discissed in some time now on this thread but any help/redirectoon would br much appeeciated.... thanks. ps. sorry i should enable spell check.