What's the best prepay option for when I visit the states (from UK)

[nickosbad]

Hiya, apologies if this has been asked before but ,I am going to the states on holiday in october and don't want to pay the extortionate data rates from O2 so I was looking on ATT's website to see what prepaid sims i can get but it so confusing.
Basically I will be visiting Orlando and want to put say $20-$30 on a sim and put it in my iPhone (Unlocked) to use the web whilst there.

Any suggestions??

nick

 

[jackiecanev2]

Wirelessly posted (BB 8900: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_0_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7A400 Safari/528.16)

Unlock + manually set the APN. Should work for voice and data. But AFAIK ATT pay as you go data gets pricey quickly. Might be a better idea to try and use wifi as often as possible.

 

[mrkgoo]

Hiya, apologies if this has been asked before but ,I am going to the states on holiday in october and don't want to pay the extortionate data rates from O2 so I was looking on ATT's website to see what prepaid sims i can get but it so confusing.
Basically I will be visiting Orlando and want to put say $20-$30 on a sim and put it in my iPhone (Unlocked) to use the web whilst there.

Any suggestions??

nick

It really is a nightmare here. It's a whole 'nother ballgame where you have to worry about coverage, paying for receiving as well as outgoing and the market is run by clsbsidies and contracts - prepay is an afterthought.

Short answer, there is no decent answer for prepaid, partcularly if you want data. Smaller providers local to each state notwithstanding, AT&T are the only ones that I know of that. Are able to provide data on prepaid, but it's 1c per kb. Yup, $10 per MB.

Until a couple weeks ago a loophole in the sidekick prepaid plan at t-mobile was $1 per day for unlimited data and text, but that was closed. You can see why that was upsetting for a lot of people. You can still use that plan for email and full Internet (using a VPN) but that can be flakey and unreliable.

If you don't use data, I'd say the best prepaid is tmobile, which has 10c outgong, 5c incoming text messages (even international!) and call rates as low as 10c per minute depending on how much you load.

Keep in mind that not all carriers can support the iPhone unlocked or not (for example the t-mobile 3g is incompatible, but their edge is fine). And all palms, even in the same class can have varying rates.

 

[sahajesh]

Yep you can do this with AT&T (or at least you could in April).

I bought an AT&T prepaid SIM off eBay and topped it up from here (UK). It worked perfectly well while I was in NY and I found out over there that there is a prepaid data plan (100Mb for $20) so I asked AT&T to add this to my account.

The only snag I had was when registering the SIM, they ask for the IMEI of the phone and when i gave them my iPhone IMEI, they said they couldn't do it. I gave them the IMEI on my old Nokia N95 and asked if the SIM would then work in any other phone.

The AT&T girl advised no but it worked fine in the iPhone so that's just perhaps a standard line they use. One bonus of using AT&T is that their customers ger free wifi in certain places (basically where there is an AT&T access point) and their APs recognised the iPhone (albeit a UK one) and also gave me free wifi access.

As mentioned before, this may have changed now but if it were me, I would still try this anyway as there's not much loss if it doesn't work but a huge saving if it does.