COMMUNICATIONS ON TOUR PART II

In my last post I explained the huge bills you could easily run up using your mobile phone in South America. I don’t want a bill for £180 when I get home, but I do want to stay in touch. So, what can we do to manage this?

If you have a Pay As You Go mobile, you can obviously limit your exposure by just buying no more credit than you are prepared to spend. Simple but not guaranteed to keep you in touch, as the network operators charge you for incoming as well as outgoing calls. (If you have a Monthly contract, you could get a PAYG sim on the same network with the same advantages and disadvantages, and just change your number for the tour). Neither of these strategies reduces the cost but they will give you an upper limit.

So I looked at buying a local PAYG sim and putting it in my phone. You can find the same sort of websites we have in the UK, for instance:

http://www.claro.com.ar/

Now, I can hablo a little bit of Espanol with the best but I would struggle to work my way through this. I considered going to a phone shop in Buenos Aires but can you imagine how long that would take?

Then I found this company:

http://www.phonerental.com.ar/english/asp/index.asp

Fantastic! You can rent a simcard and a phone for about £19.00 and they will deliver it on arrival at the airport and collect it on departure. Here are the rates, with Orange numbers as comparison:

In Argentina
Local Calls Made £0.44 (£1.75) per minute
International Calls Made £1.25 (£1.75) per minute
Calls Received £0.24 (£1.00) per minute
Local SMS (text) £0.19 (£0.50) each
International SMS £0.67 (£0.50) each

In Uruguay
Local Calls Made £1.26 (£1.75) per minute
International Calls Made £3.66 (£1.75) per minute
Calls Received £0.97 (£1.00) per minute
Local SMS (text) £0.97 (£0.50) each
International SMS £1.26 (£0.50) each

(Rates are calculated including 27% local sales tax and at an exchange rate of £1=US$1.30)

At these rates, the usage I calculated at £180 on Orange would cost £93. You still do not have a guaranteed upper limit, but we are making progress.

Is this what I recommend? What I am going to do for myself, Pam and Leo? Nah, still too dear.

More tomorrow.