I am going to China on thursday and I was wondering if my ordinary European GSM cell will work over there?

Yes it will pretty much everywhere. One word of advice though, check with your carrier which Chinese ones have the best rates, as some are more expensive than others. As an example around the pearl river Delta you can gat as many as ELEVEN GSM networks to choose from (5HK, 4 Mainland and two others, I assume Macau).

While technically it SHOULD work, check with your network to make sure they have a roaming agreement with either China Telecom or China Unicom. The preferred carrier is China Telecom which has better coverage and more network capacity. China Unicom is usable but the network doesn't have quite the capacity and gets busier more often than the other. My experience has been that most carriers will have a roaming agreement with China Telecom.

Also, roaming charges will probably be exhorbitant. Find out exactly what you'll pay! Where will you be in China? What Hfly says is correct about having multiple networks to choose from. In some places near Hong Kong you'll see the HK networks (Cable&Wireless CSL,Smartone, Hutchison Orange, New World Telecom, Peoples Telecom and Sunday), the Macau networks (Macau CTM, Smartone Macau and Hutchison Macau) and the two Chinese networks. Your best bet would be one of the HK networks as they'll likely offer the cheapest roaming deal. What you will pay will vary from carrier to carrier, in my case, SmarTone was the cheapest to roam with. Either way, enjoy your trip!

Edited to note that from what I can gather, if you use Comviq you'll be roaming on Unicom, Vodafone or Telia you'll be roaming on China Telecom so no matter which network you're on you'll be covered. Still, contact your carrier just to be sure you're set.

[This message has been edited by kanebear (edited 06-11-2002).]

I use that as well, and it is quite inexpensive to use in China. Note that some areas only have 1800Mhz coverage. A dual band 900/1800 is your best bet.

I've used my Thai AIS sim card (regular account) throughout China (coastal and interior) with solid coverage from a dual-band phone. Since I also spend a fair bit of time in Xiamen, and have to call Taiwan often, this is what I do: use my Taiwan SIM card, go up to at least the sixth floor of a building in Xiamen (e.g. Marco Polo Xiamen), and then place local calls to Taiwan! Since Xiamen is right across the Taiwan Straits from Taiwan, and there are a lot of Taiwanese in Xiamen who like to call home, several of the Taiwanese telecoms firms boosted their transceiver gains about three years ago to make life easy

*LOL* Same principle, different sides of the world. I do the same thing when in Nuevo Laredo. I'll go to a high spot and find the US network so that I don't have to roam onto the Mexican cellular system. I'm surprised China hasn't pitched a fit about this?

My guess is that the reason China does nothing is that mainland Chinese do the same thing from Taiwan when they call home. Despite all the rhetoric about cross-Straits tensions, there is an amazing amount of reciprocal investment between China and Taiwan. The economics of those mutual activities is the great stablizing force over there.