Originally Posted by
Efrem
The OP's public profile doesn't give his/her location, but depending on what it is, another option might be to get a phone and plan that don't need one. My U.S. T-mobile plan and three-year-old iPhone work fine pretty much anywhere on the planet. Voice, text, and data are all free except for outgoing calls, which are 25¢ U.S. per minute. It's on the plan I'd get anyhow, not a high-priced add-on "travel package." (When I call someone in the States for a long chat, I ask them to call me back.) I have no financial or other interest in T-mobile, but when I did the research, there's no better deal for a Yank who travels a lot. Unless you need an Australian number for other people to call, or will make a lot of calls to people who can't call a U.S. number back at no cost to them, check it out.
For us, it's not calls/txt so much as data. We tend to use quite a bit for maps, transportation, researching places to eat and things we are interested in. Tmobile is great for coverage, but they throttle data to the point of almost unusability. Their international data package works well for us when we're in the in the UK, but is a bit expensive for long visits. As we have dual SIM phones, picking up a domestic prepaid sim/esim tends to be very economical.