Joshua

I have a Sprint iPhone 4S, lucky to be one of the early ones that is not locked. (I hear Sprint will unlock it now for customers in good standing, but your mileage may vary.)

I wanted to have good data coverage on my trip and be reachable at my normal US phone number without paying exorbitant roaming fees.

The place I was staying at has the best coverage on Telstra. I ordered a $2 prepaid SIM from Telstra which unfortunately can only be shipped to an Australian address. I had family receive it and mail it over to me.

I activated it in the US (which was somewhat cumbersome; I had to call Telstra's 13 xx number as 12 xx numbers don't work from overseas). They did require a passport number to open the account. I asked the agent to subscribe me to the $50 for 30 days plan that gives you 2GB of 3G data plus lots of texts and talk minutes.

The number I called had absolutely no ability to add credit, however. I had to add credit by dialling #100# and following the prompts to add credit. My first credit card (Chase MileagePlus Explorer Visa Signature) did not work and ended up on a Telstra anti-fraud blacklist; the next credit card I tried did work.

Made a test call and lo and behold it did work, albeit at exorbitant roaming rates that Telstra applies when inside the U.S.

Upon arrival in Australia, my phone worked as expected. Now the challenge was to forward my U.S. phone calls to it without spending a lot of money.

It turns out an outfit called Localphone (Google it) offers a local U.S. number which will forward to a foreign number. I created an account with them (which took a day or so to finish) and the cost was 11 cents per minute to forward the calls to an Aussie mobile #. Localphone also has an iPhone app which would place calls to U.S. numbers for free, which was much appreciated. All I had to pay was the cost of using up my Telstra minutes of which I have many.

Finally, since I use Sprint with Google Voice, I simply added this as a forwarding phone. If you aren't on Sprint, other carriers have the ability to forward for what is usually 20 cents a minute or less. Placing calls/sending/receiving texts with Google Voice worked normally (however text forwarding to international numbers isn't possible so I had to use the GV iPhone app).