SIM for Cell Phone in China
 

I'll be travelling to various areas in mainland China next week. I have a blackberry 8830 world edition with an unlocked (according to Sprint) GSM. I was planning on getting a World Data Plan Pkg from Sprint for the 2 weeks I'm travelling which should get me access to emails.

However instead of using $2/min voice, I was thinking of purchasing China SIM. Does anyone have any information on SIMs, where purchased, how much, $/min, etc?

There is a China travel site that lists a price of $29 for the SIM which includeds $8 talk time and can be delivered to hotel. Rates back to US are $0.38/min. A contact in China says SIM rate is usually $1.20/min.

I suggest you buy a SIM on the street. The cost should be around y50. Rates are a bit south of y1/minute; there are many different plans and pricing formulas, including free incoming/roaming.

I can see you didn't look very hard or use the search function?
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/trave...ard-china.html

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_1_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7E18 Safari/528.16)

Don't get in the States via the net. You can get them in the airport when you landed. Either China Mobile or China Unicom. Half the price than your 29 USD at least.
One thing though, if you callIng international, it won't be cheaper than your 2usd/min

That was MY post. This is a better place for it.

Airport SIMs aren't as overpriced as SIMs purchased abroad, but are still ~100% above market rates.

Best thing to do is to go to a newsstand or small shop on most streets (will sell cigarettes, soft drinks and all kinds of little things) and say sim - ka.

If not (ie you dont' feel like it, or are intimidated), check into the hotel and ask the front desk and concierge to help you and if there is a place nearby where you can buy one. Say you want a local sim card and could they help you. Just to make sure, say you want a card like theirs. Should be simple.

The instructions (at least for China Mobile) if I remember correctly should be in Chinese, so if you're stumbling with that, once again the front desk and concierge should be happy to help. Very simple stuff. No need to worry about it.

There are prepend numbers that get the rates down to around y2 per minute, and even the highest rates to the US (no difference in call quality, as far as I can tell) aren't much more than a dollar per minute.

Thanks all. We'll see how it goes. I'm hoping I can get rates to US for less than $1US/min

IIRC, after you register for IDD, 12593 works with China Mobile.

Do be aware, though, that some SIM cards charge more for usage outside the "home" area (i.e. the city/province it was purchased in). If you're traveling a lot go into a carrier shop (either China Mobile or China Unicom) and ask for a SIM with discounted roaming (in China the concept of "domestic roaming" still exists) or a nation-wide rate package.

I don't know of any pre paid SIMs that don't penalize for roaming in some fashion, but even roaming rates tend to be fairly reasonable, and text is always cheap.

What about data sims? (I'm presuming that I'll need to cut down a full sized sim to micro size for an iPad)

Also interested in data
 

Hey Everyone,

I'm also looking for info on a Chinese SIM card, but I also really need one with a data feature (3G, EDGE or GPRS....anything will do).

I did a little research on the offerings from China mobile, but if I understood correctly, it seems that the prepaid cards with the data plan are not effective until the first day of the next month after you purchased the card. Does anyone know anything about this?

If someone can recommend a particular card that includes both voice and data, I would appreciate it.

There's a fun little uni-tasker tool for this http://www.cutmysim.com/

In my own research, I saw there is a 98 RMB 3G pre-pay plan from China Unicom that requires a passport and isn't available at all China Unicom offices. I didn't get a chance to test this out.