Boulder City Magazine is a monthly publication full of information about Boulder City and Southern Nevada. Boulder City Magazine features the Boulder City Home Guide, a real estate guide to Boulder City and Southern Nevada.

Boulder City Magazine® October 2006 Issue

Cover Story	Spotlight on Business	Tech Tip
Recreation Zone	BCPD Informer	Your Health
Short Stories	Home Care	A Kid's View
Library Corner	Money Matters	Lawyer's Edge
Boulder City History	The Arts	Porter Update
Reid Report	Travel Now	Day Trip'n

Travel Now
by Ihla Crowley
Drifter Sister

Communicating While Abroad

Recently, while doing research for a trip to Italy I’m putting together for next May, I came across an interesting article entitled “Using a cell phone outside the U.S.”

Turns out there’s a big, seamless network that allows cross-border cell phone use in Europe and other countries worldwide, including the U.S., making it possible to use your very own cell phone abroad.

Did you know about this? I didn’t, so I decided to learn more about it. So far, only T-Mobile, AT&T Wireless, and Cingular sell phones with this capability.

For it to work, your phone must be a relatively new version. Because my phone was three years old, I went to my carrier (T-Mobile) and purchased (for a mere $19.95) a nice little flip-top model – capable of all sorts of new things, including working in Europe. Nice.

When you’re ready to use it, a couple weeks before leaving on your trip, you must call your carrier to let them know the dates of your trip, and which country you will be visiting, in order to make sure that it uses the same frequency as your phone (most are compatible). You can then do one of two things, depending on the circumstances.

If you are going to just use the phone for emergencies, or to call home once or twice while away, your carrier will add world class roaming at no extra charge. However, calls will be 99¢ a minute, and you will be charged for incoming minutes as well.

If you will need to use your phone a lot – to call ahead for reservations, say, or communicate with other trip members – a cheaper way might be to buy and install a prepaid sim card once you are in the destination country. The sim card is a little removable computer memory phone chip that holds your data – all cell phones have them. I will talk more about this next month.

I know this sounds complicated, and I don’t have room here to give you all the details, but I just wanted to let those of you who didn’t know already (like me), that this technology is available. Some good websites to find out more about it are: www.driftersister.com, www.slowtrav.com, and http://europeforvisitors.com.

Check out my website at www.driftersister.com for more helpful tips.

Catch the wind
taste the rain
and touch all of your tomorrows…

Boulder City Magazine®
688 Wells Rd #A
Boulder City, Nevada 89005
Phone (702) 294-1392 Fax (702) 294-1392
E-mail: BoulderCityMagazine@gmail.com