You shall need a phone on the road and also as you reach your destination in Australia. There is a great way to save on your communication expenses, where the benefits are very rewarding, saving you up-to 80% of your costs on making and receiving calls on your mobile. You may decide to take your handset with you, which you are using at home. For one, that handset has to be on roaming and secondly and most importantly, your handset must work on the GSM frequencies operated in Australia. But stop for a moment. Have you thought of those call charges, the incoming and outgoing? Do you know that when you are on roaming, you need to pay a roaming charge per minute on top of the calls that you receive and make? Do you remember those days when you had to call up your friends and your family back home from the your hotel telephone? It was expensive, wasnt it? The roaming incoming and outgoing calls are as expensive if not more.

There is a way you can save. You can buy the specific prepaid SIM card for Australia. You will get an Australian phone number and along-with it you will get a limited credit for your talk time. Not only that, all incoming calls are free, no matter where it generates from, and the charges for your outgoing calls are the same as the locals pay. There are no roaming charges what-so-ever. You do not have to worry about your bills arriving at the end of the month, for, the call charges are all prepaid, which helps you to keep your expenses within your budget. There is no contract for you to sign. When you are down on your call time credit, just walk into any shop in Australia, and buy a recharge voucher/coupon to top up your credit. These are available in different denominations, so that you can choose as to how much credit you would require. The prepaid SIM card for Australia is the most convenient and economical way to keep in touch with your friends and business associates, locally and abroad and also it is the cheapest way to call your family back home.

Now, the most important of all is that, you have a prepaid SIM card for Australia, but would it work with the phone that you have? Australia uses Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) operation. Even if your handset is a GSM compatible mobile phone, it is unlikely that it will work in Australia. Over 600 countries in the world use GSM. Except North America and Canada, most the part of the world operates on different GSM frequency band. North America and Canada has limited GSM operation, and the bandwidths they operate on is not usually the one’s you have in most of the countries in the world. The solution would be to rent a phone which is compatible with the frequencies in Australia. If you are a regular traveler, it is worth considering buying a quad band mobile phone, which will cover all the GSM frequencies used in the world, including North America and Canada

There is one more thing that you need to take care of. The mobile handset that you take with you needs to be SIM unlocked. This would mean that the handset would work with any SIM that you put in. When you sign a contract with a service provide, you might get a mobile handset free along-with your SIM card. This contact binds you to a certain period of time, before which you cannot leave the services of that particular provider. Under these circumstances, the mobile handset that you received free of cost is SIM locked, meaning that you can only use the SIM card that you received from your service provider. This will not allow you to use any other SIM card. You need to make sure that the mobile phone that you are taking with you is SIM unlocked, which will allow you to use the prepaid SIM card for Australia.

In order to learn more about prepaid SIM card for Australia and renting or buying an appropriate mobile handset, vist www.planetomni.com or appropriately, www.planetomni.com/FAQ_sim.shtml for prepaid SIM card for Australia and www.planetomni.com/FAQ_gsm.shtml for renting or buying the appropriate GSM phone.

Cell phone use overseas.
In 99% of the world the local cellular service standard is called GSM. We use this in the states as well. When combined with a SIM CARD (which usually goes under the battery of the phone) the phone is able to communicate and the SIM CARD also holds the telephone number and memory for pre-paid credit. Rates can be extremely low using this system. For example in 99% of all SIM CARDS incoming calls are free and calls to the states can cost a trifle. Such as, from the UK to the USA 7 cents/minute, from Israel 22 cents, from Australia 27 cents. Yes, USA Dollar cents! There are today even prepaid service providers in the USA offering rates of 10 cents per minute to call anywhere in the US to any type of phone. No contracts, no credit card checks, no bills. Pre-paid always means no minimums no contracts, no obligations. You only pay for the calls made. You’ll need an unlocked GSM tri-band or quadband UNLOCKED phone. You can buy factory unlocked phones and sim cards for more than 170 or the 193 countries on earth from http://www.planetomni.com Tel. # 800-514-2984