You do need a cell phone when you visit Italy. Italy is a GSM country and the networks operate on 900 MHz and 1800 MHz bandwidth, where you will need a GSM handset to make and receive calls. You could take your US cell phone on roaming to Italy through your home service provider, but the outgoing and incoming calls are not cheap and you are bound to run up an outrageous monthly bill. The best way is to rent Italy cell phone from www.italysimcards.com and pay a low weekly or monthly rate at a fraction of cost to any other, renting out such phones. Italy cell phone rentals from www.italysimcards.com are not only affordable but provide you with the advantage of the cheapest of all rates available, and make your money take you further in your trip to Italy. The rates offered by www.italysimcards.com are just fractions of what it would cost you to rent Italy cell phone through conventional sources or roam with your own US cell phone through your home service provider.

To take full advantage of a comprehensive cost saving, a pre-paid Italy SIM card along with your rented Italy cell phone could save you over 80% of your call expenses. When you purchase a pre-paid Italy SIM card, you get a local cell phone number, and all your outgoing calls are charged at local rates. The calls that you receive are all FREE of any charge, no matter where they generate from. Compare this to the fact that when you take your US cell phone on roaming to Italy, you will not only pay for your outgoing call but also for your incoming calls. Since your US cell phone is on roaming through your home service provider, a business agreement has been entered into between your home service provider and the Italian network that you are using while on roaming in Italy. Through this agreement the Italian network provides a US cell phone user. like you, the necessary mobile services and each time you make or receive a call, your home service provider is charged for such service. Not only is that, with you being on roaming, there other charges that your home service provider has to pay to the Italian network provider. This is the reason why you have to pay high charges for your outgoing and incoming calls when you are roaming with your US phone in Italy.

When you rent Italy cell phone, you do not have to pay any roaming charges and with a pre-paid Italy SIM card, you pay for the calls that you make as the locals do and all your incoming calls are absolutely free. At a glance you can appreciate the savings that you have, with Italy cell phone rentals and pre-paid Italy SIM card, which can run up to more than 80% of your communication expenses which you would spend otherwise.

When you purchase a pre-paid Italy SIM card, you get an initial talk time credit. This helps you to use your Italy cell phone right away as soon as you reach Italy. For topping up your talk time credit, you can purchase a recharge voucher, which is available in any of the convenience stores in Italy. You get a choice of values for the amount of credit that you would want. These recharge vouchers are available in many denominations and you have the option to purchase the right amount of credit. You need simply to scratch off the hidden PIN in that voucher and then key in that number to have your credit topped up.

Your pre-paid SIM card for Italy is a small printed circuit board, a little smaller than a postage stamp. It goes into a slot at the back of your rented Italy cell phone and forma the main intelligent module, letting you make and receive calls. SIM stands for Subscriber Identity Module, which has an embedded microprocessor with memories. Your pre-paid SIM card holds your unique information, such as, your phone number, your service plan details, the International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) of your cell phone SIM card, and more security related details, which are transmitted to the nearest tower as soon as you switch on your Italy cell phone. This information is then matched with the database of the network that you are visiting in Italy. On matching the details, your cell phone is ready to make and receive calls.

Your pre-paid Italy SIM card also has an address book, which holds the name and numbers of the people you call frequently. The SIM card also logs your outgoing and incoming calls, including the ones which you fail to respond. These are all logged along with the relevant time and date of the calls made or received.

The number of mobile subscriptions in Italy has surpassed landline installations. As a result, the network coverage is one of the best in the world, where you will not have any ‘dropped calls’ or have difficult to connect. With your pre-paid Italy SIM card your calls will not be hopping from network to network, since you will be calling through one of the Italian networks. When you but a pre-paid Italy SIM card, you pre-pay for your calls and nothing more is charged to you. With all your incoming calls being FREE and your outgoing calls being charged at local rates, your savings, compared to any other option, are very high. You do not pay for roaming charges and you do not receive any bill at the end of the month. There is no contract for you to sign.

If you wish to take your US phone to Italy, there are three considerations to be made. One is that your cell phone needs to be GSM. Two, even if you have a GSM US cell phone it is unlikely that it will work in Italy. Networks in North America. Canada and a few other neighbouring countries work on different GSM frequency bands than that of the Italian networks. US GSM networks operate on 850 MHz and 1900 MHz frequency bands while Italy operates on 900 MHz and 1800 MHz bands. Unless you have a multi-frequency handset, could be a quad band or tri-band cell GSM phone, you will need a compatible cell phone for your trip to Italy. Italy cell phone rentals from www.italysimcards.com are all Italy network compatible and provides you the cheapest solution for your right cell phone in Italy. Third, if you plan to take your US cell phone and carry your number on roaming to Italy through your home service provider, you will need to pay high roaming charges for your outgoing and incoming calls.

You are now already convinced about the fact that Italy cell phone rentals with pre-paid Italy SIM card can save you unbelievable amounts with respect to your communication expenses. When you rent Italy cell phone and purchase a pre-paid Italy SIM card from www.italysimcards.com you get a full 24 hour support for the package, for 7 days a week, 365 days a year. What better could be the deal with www.italysimcards.com offering Italy cell phone rental at a fraction of a cost than what others offer and a pre-paid Italy SIM card, providing you with an individual saving of up to 80% of your communication costs. You do not pay anything else and since you pre-pay your call charges, you are in absolute control of your expenses.

If you are visiting Italy for the first time, you would perhaps like to know about the country. Italy is a bit larger than the Arizona. It is a long peninsula, shaping like a boat. To its west it has the Tyrrhenian Sea and on the east the Adriatic. The country is encircled by France, Switzerland, Austria, and Slovenia to the north. While the Apennine Mountains forms the backbone of the country, the Alps form the northern border. Italy is a country of beautiful lakes and the largest one is Garda, with Po being its principle river flowing from the Alps, lining the country’s western border and the river crosses Lombard plain to the Adriatic Sea. There are lots of islands which form a part of Italy, the largest being Sicily.
When you are in Italy you will be visiting, Florence, Venice, Rome and the other attractions in the country. You will be taking the Gondola down the Grand Canal, planning to visit one of the finest restaurants in Venice for a delicious Italian preparation. You would perhaps think of watching a show before that. In Rome you will visit the great Colosseum and its mammoth size will make you wonder of the ancient display of strength that went on inside, watched by 50,000 spectators around a central elliptical arena.. It is an amphitheatre, and when you stand in the middle of that great arena, you can almost hear the cheer of that crowd. You would need Italy cell phone to book your seats at the theatre and for table reservations in the restaurant that you want to have your dinner.

Where-ever you are in Italy, you cannot be without your cell phone. You have to be in touch with your associates, friends and family back home and need to be available to those who want to get in touch with you, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. You need to have a cell phone which is compatible to Italy network conditions with a calling plan which will provide you with a maximum monitory savings. What more could you expect when you go for Italy cell phone rental and a pre-paid Italy SIM card from www.italysimcards.com providing you with optimum savings on your outgoing calls, charged at local rates.

Networks in Italy operate on Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) technology and all Italy SIM cards are compatible with GSM frequency bands. The cell phone that you are taking to Italy needs to be GSM compatible, operating on the Italian network frequencies. GSM is the second (2G) generation mobile telephony technology and is the first digital system. It replaces the old first generation (1G) analog technology. GSM is used over more than 214 countries and has more than 80% of subscribers out of the total number of mobile users in the world. GSM has a set of four frequency bands, 850 MHz, 900 MHz, 1800 MHz and 1900 MHz, which are distributed to the different regions in the world. The GSM frequency bands used by the networks in Northern America, Canada and few other countries in the Americas are quite exclusive to the rest of the world and this sets US apart from the rest of the world regions. It is for this reason that US GSM cell phones are unlikely to work in Italy, unless the cell phone is a multi-frequency handset.
For convenience of travellers, cell phones now come with the features to respond to multiple bandwidths. The quad band phone responds to all the GSM frequencies and can be taken to any part of the world. The tri-band covers three of the four GSM frequency bandwidths, which are 800MHz, 900MHz and 1800MHz. The dual band on the other hand operates on just two frequency bands - 800MHz and 1900MHz.

Your GSM cell phone must be SIM unlocked before any SIM card can be used with it. SIM locked cell phones can only operate with the SIM card that it is meant for and therefore, your handset has to be SIM unlocked for you to use the pre-paid Italy SIM card. When you enter into a contact with your service provider, there may be a clause that might stipulate that you need to be in service with the provider for a specific period of time. In exchange, the service provider offers a cell phone, absolutely free of any cost and this phone is necessarily SIM locked. This is done to ensure that you use the SIM card that you received from the service provider and none else. At the end of the contract period, your cell phone becomes your property and your service provider assists you to SIM unlock your phone. It is then that you may opt for any other SIM card that you may like to use.

Whether you are taking your own US GSM cell phone, buying one or renting, it is imperative that the cell phone that you are taking with you to Italy is SIM unlocked. All Italy cell phone rentals from www.italysimcards.com are not only SIM unlocked but are also compatible with the network frequency bands in Italy.

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 of the 193 countries on earth from http://www.planetomni.com Tel. # 800-514-2984