I went to Switzerland and bought a Natel Easy Be Free starter kit from the Swisscom shop in the Lausanne Train Station. http://www.swisscom.ch/res/mobile/ta...free/index.htm
Although Swisscom has an online store, you must present the SIM at a Swisscom shop in person with your passport so I figured I'd skip the mail and get it there.
The starter kit consists of a SIM card and 20CHF of credit for 19.90CHF. Mobile data is 4CHF per day for all you can eat. The instruction book is in French, German and Italian. I am using it in an unlocked Novatel Expresscard on my PC. The only trick was that at first it failed to connect using gprs.swisscom.ch as the APN. ( note that this is 3G where available, even though the name has gprs in it) I tried troubleshooting by putting the SIM in a phone, entered the pin provided, and a message appeared on the screen asking me in French to choose oui to accept the terms which I did. Then I took the SIM out of the phone put it in the data card and was good to go. Since CHF and US$ are about equal in value this week, this comes to $4 per day and is way cheaper than my hotel is charging.
I got 3G everywhere but in a few places inside an office building I manually selected GPRS because it was a much stronger signal and prior to doing so the card had been switching back and forth between 2G and 3G.
I have not used the SIM for voice, but Skype works fine using the SIM with my laptop.
Hello. Lots of great info here. Read the whole thing.
I'm going to Italy in a week, and was wondering what's available, and what's best for both voice and data.
I'd need to get a SIM and some kind of prepaid plan, but I have no idea which company to go to.
I'll be taking my unlocked GSM phone and my laptop with 950X data card.
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In (late) preparation for the *A DO (given that I now have a non-GSM Verizon phone)...I plan on bringing my old iPhone 3G with me for calls from Frankfurt, Oslo, and Toulouse. Any suggestions for the best sim card/package to get for Germany, Norway, and France?
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What's a good prepaid SIM for flat-rate data service in Spain? This would be for an unlocked iPhone. Looking for something similar to the £1/day TMobile UK or 4CHF Swisscom offer mentioned a few posts up.
Care much less about voice calls although I'd appreciate at least the ability to make them; won't be making any voice calls to places outside Spain.
