Russia - Russian prepaid SIM - roaming in Ukraine?

Hello,

I am currently in St Petersburg. After this my itinerary takes me to Helsinki, then Tallinn, and then into the Ukraine for several weeks.

I have a prepaid MTS sim card that I picked up in Moscow that has been working great. My original plan was to stop using this card when I left russia, to skip a phone for helsinki and tallinn (or to pick up new sims there, if it seemed sufficiently convenient given my short stays in each), and to get a new one for the Ukraine.

I see online, however, that MTS also operates a Ukraine subsidiary, and that MTS ukraine specifically advertises what seem like pretty decent roaming rates for Russia. I was wondering: does anyone know if a similar provision exists for MTS russia subscribers traveling in the Ukraine, or will roaming be sufficiently prohibitive such that I should just pick up a new SIM? The MTS ukraine web site is very helpful in English but the MTS russia web site, well, isn't.

I'm also vaguely curious what the roaming arrangements are in Helsinki and Estonia but I suspect the arrangement with the Ukraine is more likely to be favorable than the other two.

This business of swapping SIM cards every time you enter a new country is a little bit of a hassle - I wonder how long before you start to see well priced cross-regional SIM cards...

--Matt

I use my MTC sim in Ukraine and never think twice about the rates. The difference seems negligible to me. I'm sure there's a rate break for Ukraine with them. I just never think to ask or look at the MTC Russian site. I would encourage you to charge up your account though in Russia. Not sure how the payment kiosks would react if you tried to put in a Russian number while in Ukraine. Maybe it would be fine but best not to risk it I would say.

If you have time, go to an official MTC store and ask them. There's tons of price breaks they offer you given on where you'll be, how much you plan to call, what plan you have, how many texts you're going to send, etc. Most are accessible with just a text sent to a special MTC number. Report back what you find (fancy way of asking you to do for me what I should do for myself) and we'll all benefit!

Just to update for future searchers: I tried to discuss roaming in the Ukraine on MTS with a store operator in Moscow and they thought it'd be fine. However, upon arriving here (I'm in Kiev now) I found that my credit was depleted fairly quickly. I hadn't put much extra on but it was definitely costing me 2-3 times as much as it had when I was in St Petersburg (where there were already roaming charges as I'd first gotten the sim in Moscow)

It's probably true that there was some deal where I could have reduced roaming rates by texting in some code to activate a new rate plan but all that info was in Russian and was opaque to me (I got many texts from MTS upon arriving here that might have been useful has I understood them).

Regardless, Kiev was packed to the gills with stands selling incredibly inexpensive sim cards and top-ups, and unlike in Russia there wasn't even any formality involving my passport or anything - you pay the vendor, he hands you a sim card and a code to enter on your phone, and you're done. The only minor complication was that to activate the microsim in my iPad we had to put it in a handset first to send the initial SMS code and the top up code.

So, while roaming might be possible from Russia for a reasonable rate, I did not find it an obvious process (I am able to sound out cyrillic but don't speak either Russian or Ukranian), and the simplicity of getting a working sim card in the Ukraine won out for me by far.