Originally Posted by
printingray
The best and least international service I have used is Call In Europe . I purchased a Motorola V197 GSM Quad phone which is compact and rich with features. I will be able to use it whenever I travel with new SIM cards. The Call In Europe has a variety of plans based on which parts of Europe you will be visiting. This made costs very reasonable compared to other plans I reviewed. I traveled by car in Croatia, Slovenia and Italy for 6 weeks. They provide you with a personal telephone number. I was primary located in Italy for 4 of those weeks so purchased an inexpensive SIM card from them which used Italy as the central communications services. Once you purchased the SIM card (which was very reasonable) you were only billed for time used. I had used Verizon previously and found it to be very expensive compared to Call In Europe as well one of the more expensive programs.
You can find cheap quadband phones on Amazon. If you are visiting multiple countries, you might be interested in a roaming SIM which is a prepaid SIM which is marketed based on cheap roaming rates rather than on great rates for a particular country. The choices include eKit, TravelSIM, Maxroam, Truphone, and others. Look at the countries you are visiting and compare rates.