Roaming With Your Smartphone

We were using our smartphones a lot while we were away at the show mainly to check and send emails. The 3G coverage in the UK was good and more reliable than the Smartphone Show’s wifi unfortunately. We weren’t initially that impressed with the 3G coverage while we were in HK. It didn’t make sense to us that a city with all sorts of advances such as mobile reception on the subway, could have such a dismal 3G reception. After a few days, we found out that our phones keep switching between 2G and 3G. It looks like the phones were confused and in many cases, using 2G rather than the available 3G. We tried turning off 2G completely rather than 3G as we had always previously done. Suddenly, 3G reception was great. We discovered that the problem lies with the phones and the SIM being roaming rather than issues with the 3G network there, probably the many choices of networks confused the phone.

Save on roaming charges

3 has a handy 3 Like Home plan offering roaming between UK, Ireland, Hong Kong, Italy, Sweden, Austria, Denmark and Australia at local call charges. We were traveling between Australia, UK and Hong Kong for the show this time and since all 3 countries were covered by the plan, we were able to use our phones making calls back to Australia or calls to the country we were in without incurring international roaming rates. The best part is 3 Like Home includes sms and emails, so we were only charged at the normal rates as if we were in Australia while downloading and sending sms and emails from overseas.

Posted November 20, 2008