International Phone

I recently built a Droid phone that can be used just about anywhere in the world where there’s either wifi or a mobile network, and thought I would share that experience.  This isn’t meant to be a ‘how-to’ guide or to be the ultimate answer for everyone.

I started out purchasing a Motorola XT701 not necessarily to build an international phone but because I’m programming droid apps and I needed a development phone.  It just turned out that the family is traveling internationally this next year and I was curious about the different methods for taking a phone along.  I could do the same thing with my iPhone, however, its tied to an AT&T subscription that I can’t cheaply get out of right now, and their international roaming fees are a bit steep so this solution is a bit more frugal.

First, you need the right hardware.  For this method, you must have a  GSM phone.  In short, this means it uses a standard SIM card.  AT&T and T-Mobile use these kinds of phones, while Sprint and, I believe, Verizon are using CDMA technology.  I’m not going to get into which is better, cheaper, faster or how to convert one to another, I’m just saying that for this solution, the phone must be GSM.  The phone must also operate on the right frequency bands.  North American networks pretty much operate in the 800 MHz and 1900 MHz spectrums while Europe, Asia and Africa are mostly 900 MHz and 1800 MHz.  South America seems to be a mixture of all of these.  This means that to truly have a global phone (for this method anyway) you need to buy one of the new Quad Band phones.  The iPhone, along with many of the new droids, come this way now, just look for one that says something like “GSM 850/ 900/ 1800/ 1900 MHz”.

Another thing to think about, as far as hardware, is that unless you’re willing to pay US network roaming fees, you should get an unlocked phone, or unlock the one you have.  There is plenty of information out there on unlocking phones, just Google it.  I purchased an unlocked phone from China (off Amazon) so that I wouldn’t have to sign up for yet another subscription with one of the US carriers but as I mentioned earlier, I could use my AT&T iPhone that I have both unlocked and jailbroken.

Control Central

Ok, enough on the hardware.  My quest, after buying this extra droid phone, was to figure out the best way to make phone calls without swapping my iPhone’s SIM card all the time, so I started out looking for ways to make a SIMless phone call.  Of course, you need some kind of a network to make a phone call and if you have a GSM phone without a GSM SIM card, you’re pretty much stuck with using the Internet as your network.  There’s a few ways to do this, one is Skype, or other similar services, where you can call anyone with a Skype account (who is online at the time) for free and you pay a little extra for calling landlines.  So I downloaded the Skype app from the Droid market (there’s one for iPhone too).

A SIP phone is another online option, where you can get a phone number from places like ipkall.com and then using a free service like PBXes.com, you can setup your own SIP phone.  There’s plenty of instructions for doing this stuff if you just Google it, so I’m not going to go into the details here, but I tried going the PBXes route and, although I did get it to work, it didn’t work all the time for both sending and receiving so I went the Google Voice/Gizmo5 route using the SIPDroid application off the Droid Market.  This solution requires that you have both a Google Voice account and a Gizmo5 account with phone number.  Fortunately for me, I already had a Gizmo5 account and number, because since Google acquired Gizmo5, they are not allowing any new subscriptions until they can figure out what they’re doing with it.  You can use just a Google Voice account, which will give you a phone number so that you can receive calls but to make them, gets a little goofy if you don’t have a Gizmo or regular mobile number to assign to your account.  Of course you can make calls from your browser but that kind of defeats the purpose when you have to carry around your laptop.

Now, with Skype and Google Voice working for me, I can virtually make and receive calls from any wifi spot in the world but I needed to go one step further and have some kind of SIM card for operations outside the wifi hotspots.  I studied the various ‘prepaid’ options and finally decided to go with the SIMple US card from http://www.simplecallingservice.com/ There are countless companies and plans so do your research because it really depends on where you travel and how often you’re going to be outside a wifi hotspot, along with how much time you spend on the phone.  This solution gives me a global UK phone number, along with a US number, and I can use it in a couple hundred different countries.  You can recharge your prepaid minutes either online or with a free phone call but none of the plans are really what I would consider ‘cheap minutes’ and data plans are simply outrageous so you’re going to look for a wifi hotspot whenever possible.  I consider the GSM network as a last resort method for making and receiving calls and I will certainly look around for free wifi before using it.  Just a final note, you can also just purchase a country specific SIM in each country you visit and probably get cheaper minutes but your phone number keeps changing, making it difficult for friends and family to get a hold of you.

Well, so there you have it.

Enjoy!