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Traveling to Italy with Verizon 4s

N

NYRangers11

macrumors member
Original poster
Jan 28, 2011
91
0
Hi Guys,
I am traveling to Italy for a week in February. I want to take along my iPhone 4s and i need some advice. I'm not sure if Verizon supports international travel but i probably wouldn't want to pay their high fees anyways.

1. What suggestions do you have as far as italian prepaid sim cards (i know i would have to unlock the phone first).

2. If i do find a sim card, what settings should I set my phone to so it won't run on Verizon?

3. If i don't find an italian prepaid sim card or choose not to use one, what setting do you recommend so i can only use wifi if any is available? I don't want to get charged for any Verizon international talk, web or text.

Thanks.

If you have any prior experience with Italian pre paid sim cards, all recommendations are very welcome.
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A406 Safari/7534.48.3)

It is only 60 days, and you have to be in good standing. Although I got a replacement 4S yesterday and called them up and they unlocked a 2nd one
For me. It's really a pain free process. I wouldn't have been in such a hurry but I don't want to forget about having to do that restore and then be forced to upgrade to higher FW and lose my JB.
 
Call Verizon Global Support, pick option 2. Tell the person you want to unlock your SIM. They send a note to Apple, Apple sends a signal to your phone that unlocks that SIM slot. Pop out the Verizon Sim, replace it with your foreign SIM. You'll get an "Activation Required" prompt. Either connect to iTunes or choose an available WiFi signal and in literally seconds your foreign SIM will be working. If you are in USA when you do all this, most likely you'll suddenly find yourself roaming on AT&T (carrier will say AT&T at top) and you'll get a couple of text messages from your foreign SIM provider telling you that you are, indeed, roaming internationally. Pull out the foreign SIM, replace it with the Verizon SIM, and you are back on Verizon.

I did the above yesterday. Took all of five minutes from beginning to end. Both my Israeli Pelephone SIM and my France Orange SIM now work.

If you do this, you don't have to "turn off" anything on your phone to disable Verizon. It seems the SIM dictates what carrier you connect to. When I put in Orange or Pelephone SIM's I am on AT&T automatically. Put the Verizon one back in, and I'm back on Verizon (via CDMA).

Unless you've got an unlimited data plan for your foreign SIM, however, I still recommend turning off Data Roaming when abroad. You can do this via Settings>General>Network and disabling Cellular Data and Data Roaming. This makes WiFi your only data option. Although Voice and SMS/TXT messages will still work.
 
hello! i live in italy depending on the day :D. definitely call verizon global support and have them unlock your phone.

in my experience, the carrier WIND is the cheapest you will find. you'll find their stores all over major italian cities. i believe it is something around 9 euros a month of unlimited data. most of the time they have promotions so the price is always fluctuating. the sim card is 5 euros to buy and you get some credit on it as well. definitely do this option. free incoming from local numbers and i think its about 12 cents a minute to make a local call too.

have fun!
 
Also, if you have/use Google Voice (or go ahead and sign up for it) you should be able to use the Talkatone app on the iPhone to make (and I believe receive) calls using Google Voice via WiFi. And you can use it (essentially Google Voice) for text messaging as well.
 
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