How to Get an International Prepaid Cell Phone

An international prepaid cell phone is a great choice for those who need to make calls to foreign or overseas locations. While it can be quite expensive to make those calls from a regular cell phone or a landline, with a prepaid phone you know exactly how much those calls will cost. Before buying, you need to do a little research first.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

1. Look at the prepaid cell phones available from at your neighborhood stores. Read the packaging carefully to determine if any of the phones are able to make international calls. Electronics stores and mass merchandise stores like Best Buy and Target all sell prepaid phones.

2. Ask providers in your area that market prepaid cell phones if they have any available international choices. You might be surprised at the response you get, as several major companies including Alltel make international prepaid cell phones.

3. Purchase a GSM prepaid cell phone from a local company and an additional SIM card to use when you're in a foreign country. This option is easy because you can remove the card when in the United States and place the card back in when you're abroad. The SIM card connects to the international frequencies used in other countries to give you a working cell phone.

4. Choose a prepaid cell phone from your favorite company and pay the international roaming charges if you don't plan on using the phone very often. Most phones that use a SIM card can be used abroad, though the companies do charge high fees.

5. Buy an unlocked cell phone through one of the retailers offering them online. EBay is a great place to find a variety of unlocked cell phones. The unlocked phone will enable you to use it internationally because it connects to all towers and frequencies, which means you won't have to pay high roaming fees.

6. Use your own prepaid cell phone as an international phone by paying someone to unlock the phone or unlocking it yourself using one of the websites that offer the codes. This gives you a prepaid international cell phone capable of working on any network. Unlock to Talk has a large number of unlock codes available for sale on its website.

Tips & Warnings

• GSM stands for Global System for Mobile Communications and means the phone is capable of making calls internationally.
• Don't automatically assume that all prepaid cell phones can make international calls. These calls require a special frequency that many prepaid cell phones on the market do not have.

Resources

• Find codes from Unlock to Talk

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on 8/22/2009 No need for much research. Try a TracFone, available at Walmart and serviced for about $45 a month. It lets you call over 100 countries while charging as local calls. For some, like Mexico and Canada, you can set up a local number in any of their cities and when dialing into a US TracFone will be billed as a local call. Best value around.

[greensugar]

on 8/4/2009 Excellent. Thanks for sharing these great tips. I will put them to use today.