Taking cellphone to the US

The t-mobile card is $100 for 1000 minutes and good for a year. A much better deal that Tracphone.

Yeah but Tracfone gives you a phone with the card for $100. At least it says that on their website.

I think these "so many minutes" cards are a bit of a con, because it depends on what time you use it, where you use it, who you're calling, etc.

As long as the phone stays active and I get a few hours out of it and it works in the area where I am that's the important criteria. I suppose I'll have to talk to some zitty kid next time I'm in Montana at one of the shops and see if I can refine the fine print.

The thing I'm thinking is that if I get a $100 Verizon card it's going to go the furthest in Montana because Verizon own the network. At least that's the logical way of looking at it. But then for whatever reason I'll probably end up on I-5 in California with a broken down rental car and end up getting reamed on roaming charges.

C'est la vie.

Verizon's network is fairly large, and covers most of the US, so I'm not sure how they ding you with roaming charges. If they get you as soon as you're out of your own calling area (like, the next area code maybe) or if you happen to fall into one of the very few dead zones on their network.

The only time I can recall getting roaming charges on Verizon is when I make calls or receive calls when I'm in Canada, or when we go on vacation out to Ocracoke on the Outer Banks. They don't have coverage there.

It's hard out west with cellphones, I think there's some sort of agreement that certain providers cover certain areas, I seem to remember Idaho is a different provider than Montana. There are these huge empty areas in places like Wyoming and obviously there's not going to be any competition.

All I know is my rental car did break down last month when I was in the US and Rogers charged me $15 roaming charges to receive incoming calls from Hertz recovery. I can't remember what they charged for the initial call but it was a lot.

Wow, what we did was went to Wal-Mart and asked for the phone that worked here. I think the disposable ones latch onto whatever network is around, we don't have any trouble with ours, where other people have to stand on a certain side of a building depending on if they have Verizon or AT

Which is probably why Tracfone gives you 450 minutes for $100 and T-mobile gives you 1000 for the same price - because Tracfone is roaming. But I wouldn't be surprised if you used T-mobile somewhere like Montana where they have no network that there is some sort of surcharge.

No roaming charges with t-mobile; I used mine when out of network and it never cost any extra. That was ~ 2.5 yrs ago - today YMMV.

So anyway I got a phone from Verizon. I was with someone who had a US T-mobile phone and coverage was definitely better in the San Diego area with Verizon, and also as compared with AT&T via roaming on Rogers.

The only thing I'll say is the service I got from three different people in the Verizon shop was diabolically bad, the information they gave me on several points was totally wrong (and one of them was an actual adult). Glad I checked their website to begin with, I eventually got it sorted with the customer service people on the phone.

You do need a US address if you want to buy extra credit.

FWIW, I've had a TracFone for a few years now and it's worked well. We did have a problem last summer when the phone was 'red flagged' and disconnected for no reason. I was able to call them and get it straightened out but it took a few days and they were never able to give me any reasonable explanation. Other than that though, it's really worked well for us and the cost is very good (I think it's significantly cheaper than my Canadian pre-paid phone).

We do use our Canadian Telus phone in the US for text messaging but we've had mixed results with that. We've always been able to send messages but last time we in the US (Florida at XMas time), we didn't receive any messages until we returned to Canada (i.e. we got 2 weeks worth of messages all of a sudden when the plane landed and we turned on our phone). Asked Telus about it and they said that it *should* work in the US but it's not their network so there's nothing they can do about it.

One thing I like about the Tracfone as well is that you can add a Canadian phone number to it for free. My Tracfone is based in Florida and has a Florida phone number, but it also has a Calgary (403) phone number. People in Calgary call me when I'm in Florida by dialing a local Calgary phone number. There's no charge for the caller as its a local call, and there's no additional charges other than normal airtime for me.