[REQ] Cheapest backpacker phone for South America

duffmagic

A friend is heading backpacking around South America starting in March. At the moment, she's on Vodafone PAYG. She can't roam in SA on this. She can if she moves to billpay, or better yet if she moves to meteor PAYG. In this case, you give your credit card details and €60 up front. I can't get the O2 site to even load today to check their roaming deals. Three don't appear to cover SA.

She is only really interested in texting home, but the roaming texting rate is normally 59c a pop on vodafone billpay, 39c a pop on meteor for europe (and may be more for SA - I'm waiting to hear from Meteor on this).

Are there any deals I'm not aware of that could save her money? Does anyone know if there's a SA operator that gives reasonable rates across all of SA? It would be ideal to just get a sim when she arrives in Buenos Aires. Otherwise, has anyone used AlmostFreeTexts in SA? I doubt there's any data services in most of these countries, so I think that's out of the question.

Thanks in advance for your replies.

Random

O2 data only SIM (contact, but only pay as you use the data), along with 250 free international webtexts and AFT (see the other thread on this forum about the app).

This should do the job for you

hk797

duffmagic wrote:

A friend is heading backpacking around South America starting in March.

Checkout this new service from a crowd in Cork.

Only heard about them today so have not looked into it yet.

SteadyEddie

Why get a contract here? tell her to get a phone - make sure it is unlocked, and then buy a sim out there depending on what country she is in. Thats what I would do - it is a straight forward process and saves a lot of cash.

duffmagic

Thanks for your comments everyone.

ciaranfo - O2's site isn't responding so I can't confirm those data rates (and the roaming data rates). However, I'd guess that only Brazil and Argentina would have data services. I've fully read through the 2 AFT threads and I can only see comments regarding roaming through europe.

hk797 - That looks very interesting, but unfortunately there aren't enough SA countries to make it suitable for my friend. Great for europe though. I might get a sim myself.

SteadyEddie - Absolutely. This would be ideal, but when you're hopping from country to country rather than staying in one place, you're roaming again.

Random

SteadyEddie - I assume they'd like to recieve texts from people here, and the people back home having to pay international rates would mean they'd hear from them less

duffmagic - ring 1850601740 and ask O2 to go through the rates with you if the websites not loading.