Travel Technology - Prepaid GSM sim card for ITH and NYC

I will be in ITH for a week and NYC for 3 days in July and need a prepaid sim card to use with my GSM triband (900/1800/1900) phone. I plan to use it mainly to make local outgoing calls and text message my friends/family in Asia. I'm not too familiar with US prepaid plans and have a couple of questions:

1. Which carriers offering prepaid sim have good coverage in ITH and NYC(Manhattan)? Cingular seems to cover both. How about T-Mobile?
2. If I buy the card in ITH, will I have to pay some sort of national roaming charges if I use it in NYC?

Any suggestions or comments?

Can't answer the prepaid SIM question, but I can tell you that you will probably have lousy service without the lower band used in the States. I have a triband that will work in some places in the New York City area (actually a good portion of the area has some coverage) but virtually never gets a signal anyplace else.

You really need the 850 signal to be able to use GSM reliably in the United States, even with that about 1/4 of my calls are TMDA.

You really need the 850 signal to be able to use GSM reliably in the United States, even with that about 1/4 of my calls are TMDA.T-Mobile only uses 1900 MHz and not 850. The only place I've consistently had problems is in northern New England. Your point is valid for Cingular and AT&T.

There's a tendril of TMobile coverage in Ithaca, but it looks like you won't be able to go far out of town.

Added: I just checked TMobile.com and the local calling region for Ithaca includes all of New York and Pennsylvania. So your minutes in Ithaca should also work in NYC.

As of two weeks ago, the only US carrier that would just let me buy a SIM card (without a stack of ID's, purchasing a handset, and an hour explaining ... I would want to buy a SIM card by itself) was Cingular.

$25 with a $25 airtime credit. I had to give them a name and 10 minutes later it was all set to go. The kid in the SEA store had a good sense of humor, so my current US number belongs to "Jeremiah Horsecock".

T-mobile sims are on Ebay or at www.expansys.com. Their prepaid sims come with FREE GPRS and after you add $25 they are valid for a full year (promo at the moment).

T-mobile prepaid SIMs work in most every US airport & metropolis that has US customs or immigration on site at the airport.

There is no roaming surcharge as long as you are on T-mobile or their still shared Cingular network. Just make sure you have the right band. [Actually, roaming surcharges are not even a possibility as T-mobile blocks their pre-paid customers from using any networks other than ones that are included for free domestically. Coverage in NY will be great. In Ithaca, Syracuse and on routes to/from New York, I have no idea.

As a plus (and the only reason I cared to find all this out in the first place), T-mobile prepaid, for now, has free WAP/GPRS that creatively can be manipulated to do mucho more than T-mobile originally intended (in most likelihood).

I used to have ATT TDMA wireless and a business associate I travel with a lot has one of the GSM/TDMA phones from ATT. It seems that the coverage around NYC is better on my TMobile GSM phone than on his dual mode phone. In fact I have been very happy with TMobile coverage in the US. I dont spend much time in small cities (dont know about ITH) but in cities I have been to recently, including even some that are small (like Taos, NM) my TMobile coverage has been almost as good as my Verizon coverage. Also, the TMobile prepaids sound like a pretty good deal. You can probably get very precise coverage information for ITH at www.howardforums.com in the TMobile and Cingular forums. Around NYC though, TMobile is quite good.

Thanks for all the info ^

I don't see myself buying a new phone just to use the 850 band for 10 days, and based on alanw's experience, I might go with Cingular. Will make a more informed decision after going through howardforums.

Thanks for all the info ^

I don't see myself buying a new phone just to use the 850 band for 10 days, and based on alanw's experience, I might go with Cingular. Will make a more informed decision after going through howardforums.OK, but it sounds like your tri-band phone won't work with Cingular's 850 MHz coverage.

Cingluar, like AT&T has both 850 and 1900 MHz coverage in the US but their recent network improvements have been only in the 850 MHz band. All of hte phones Cingular currently sells work in either band so it's not much of an issue for their customers, but you may not be happy with your 1900 MHz Cingular coverage.

Even in NYC AT&T customers with 1900 MHz phones (you can still buy 1900 MHz-only phones from AT&T even though their network works better with a 850/1900 phone) are frequently frustrated with the quality of AT&T's 1900 MHz coverage.