Getting a Phone

No one gets a landline and you should not bring a cordless phone with you.  That means you are buying a cell phone.  Since you are now going to travel from the mainland to Grenada and St. Vincent’s (and possibly Prague) you probably want a phone that can work in all areas.  For this, you need to buy a Quad-Band GSM phone.  Two main companies offer GSM service in the USA.  AT&T and Cingular have now merged into one company, and the second company is T-Mobile.  As far as I know, Verizon and Sprint will not work on the islands.  So here’s what you do:

1) buy a Quad-Band GSM phone from one of these companies
2) make sure that it is a pay-as-you-go phone with a SIM card
3) Google “unlock SIM” and pay for your phone to be unlocked

I’ll explain all of that:

There are four major broadcasting systems used throughout the world.  Therefore, a Quad-Band phone means that you will never have to buy a new phone for travel.  The SIM card is a chip that contains your phone number and your contacts.  Put another way, it does not matter from what phone you call: if you put your SIM card in any phone the person you are calling will see that it is you.  So if you buy a SIM Quad-Band phone at home, you will have a SIM card with your home’s area code.  When you come to Grenada, you will buy another SIM card with a Grenadian number.  At this point, you can simply switch the SIM cards while you are on one of the islands and then switch them back when you return home.  Taping them into your passport is a nice way to keep track of them when not in use.

The reason you have to “unlock” your phone is so that your T-Mobile phone (for example) will operate with a Digicel SIM card from Grenada (for example).  Pay-as-you-go means that if you want to talk for ten minutes, you buy ten minutes.  If you talk over that, the phone simply cuts off (after a warning of course).  This means that you cannot possibly suffer overage charges and you are not roped into a contract.  And why do you have to pay to unlock your phone?  Because T-mobile does not want you to buy there phone and then use it with an AT&T SIM card.  T-mobile wants your money.  Typically, these companies will unlock your phone for free if you have owned it for three months, but if you are reading this now that is a bit of late notice.  So pay to have it unlocked from a separate code vendor (found online) and you should be set.

Some students make use of internet phones as well.  There are several programs that allow you to make phone calls over the internet for pennies a minute to anywhere in the world.  Skype, Netphone, and PCPhone are popular programs and only require a headset with microphone.