Vodacom Roaming

Dolby

Dolby

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I'm going to Netherlands, Amsterdam next week and want to take my cellphone with me. Got a few questions though ...

- I assume one can roam in ANY country when arranged?
- How are costs? SMSs and GPRS/EDGE in particular
- Does GPRS/EDGE work over there? I use GPRS/EDGE to connect to IRC and email daily

Thanks
 
When you have roaming enabled on your contract account you can roam on any network that has a roaming agreement with vodacom. Each foreign network has diffrent charges. So check the charge guide on vodacoms site. (you can sometimes get cheaper calls by finding the cheapest network on vodacoms site and then manually selecting that network on your phone. Data prices are very expensive.

roaming info on vodacoms website

charge guide
 
Wow ... check those GPRS rates ....R179.65 per MB ... ouch!
 
One more thing i forgot to mention, if someone calls you while you are roaming then you have to pay for the call to be routed from SA. Therefore if someone calls you from the netherlands then they pay for an international call to SA and you pay for the call to go back to the Netherlands. From what i've been told, if you don't answer your call and the call gets diverted to your voice mail then you have to pay for an international call back to South Africa. Therefore if someone calls you from SA and you don't answer your phone then you have to pay for 2 international calls so they can speak to your voicemail. $$$ How you can avoid this is to set an unconditional call divert to voicemail before you leave SA and then all incoming calls will not leave SA. Then setup a extended absence greeting saying that if people need to get hold of you then they must send you an sms. (receiving sms's are free)
 
Well that's a relief at least. Basically I only want access to SMSs anyway. I'll set unconditonal so ALL voice calls are diverted. So to send an SMS, am I right in saying it's R2.06 (Orange, Netherlands) plus 80c (Vodacom, South Africa)?

Gambit, is it possible to buy prepaid cards like in SA for next to nothing, use it for cheap GPRS, and toss it when I come back?
 
Dolby said:
Well that's a relief at least. Basically I only want access to SMSs anyway. I'll set unconditonal so ALL voice calls are diverted. So to send an SMS, am I right in saying it's R2.06 (Orange, Netherlands) plus 80c (Vodacom, South Africa)?

Gambit, is it possible to buy prepaid cards like in SA for next to nothing, use it for cheap GPRS, and toss it when I come back?
Click to expand...
The R2.06 will be the full price you will pay to send an sms from Orange. (no 80c for vodacom) If you are not interested in making calls (not even local holland calls) then you could also use sms roamer. Which is really easy for you to activate before you leave and can only send and receive sms's while it's active. You don't even have to get roaming enabled on your account to use this service. I've never been to holland but i use a virgin mobile pay as you go sim in the UK which was cheap and gives you a local number, which is nice if you know people in holland.
 
I recently visited UK and bought local prepaid. I only found GPRS pre-paid on Vodafone and it was extremely expensive. ( I tried Orange and O2, they only let me connect to their own WAP site) My solution was Wi-Fi connection from my laptop. Usually free in coffee shops or such like.
 
davecyncots said:
I recently visited UK and bought local prepaid. I only found GPRS pre-paid on Vodafone and it was extremely expensive. ( I tried Orange and O2, they only let me connect to their own WAP site) My solution was Wi-Fi connection from my laptop. Usually free in coffee shops or such like.
Click to expand...
Virgin mobile definately supports prepaid gprs in the UK. It think it's half a pence per kilobyte. It didn't break the bank when I used it to check the national rail wap portal for train times daily.
 
A mate of mine just received his bill for roaming in Europe and the UK for a month with his vodafone card on a 3G One package. The bill came to around R70 000 for 700mb of traffic... yikes!
 
Hydrofire said:
A mate of mine just received his bill for roaming in Europe and the UK for a month with his vodafone card on a 3G One package. The bill came to around R70 000 for 700mb of traffic... yikes!
Click to expand...

Yip I got whacked with a R3500.00 bill too, Vodaphone charge R100.00/mb whilst roaming, and from my experience the coverage wasn't that good in the UK (Northern London) and is definately not worth the money.

I had better luck finding unsecured wireless networks around, and using their bandwith - I found 10 in one area, and it's amazing how many people with wireless don't have some kind of security/authentication on their networks, but then bandwith cost is not a problem, so maybe that's why?
 
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