[pct-l] Foreign Hiker - 2 questions

[Rob Flynn]

" AT&T merged with Sprint and is now CDMA  Most plans in the USA require 2
year contracts. T-Mobile is the only major company to remove this
requirement and is GSM."

Woah, most of this is not correct.  AT&T and T-Mobile almost merged, but
that fell through.  AT&T and T-Mobile use GSM, not CDMA (which Verizon and
Sprint use).  All 4 major US carriers (amongst many other smaller providers)
have pay-as-you-go services available, which do not require 2 year
contracts, but the selection of phones available is lower for these
services.  I would still obviously use one of these pay-as-you-go services
versus the 2-year contract though, in your case.

I would recommend you ask the various local mobile phone service providers
in Germany to see what options they have for using your existing phone in
the US.  If that doesn't work, then start perusing the US providers to see
what options you have; if you use a local GSM service provider, you can
probably just purchase a SIM card in the US, and still use your existing
phone.  As others have pointed out, Verizon has the best service on the PCT
(but is CDMA and will require a new phone), with AT&T being about half as
good (which is still decent enough in my experience, and might be preferred
if you want to use your existing phone, since it is GSM).  Sprint and
T-Mobile both don't care about rural areas very much, and their service is
quite terrible on the PCT, but will work in some of the larger trail towns.
There are numerous smaller providers, especially in the pay-as-you-go arena,
and they often use one of the larger providers' towers for their signal.

Very convoluted, but if you choose the wrong plan you can really pay a lot
of money for foreign service.


Inspector Gadget