:help: hey everyone…i am on my 3rd trip to kaohsiung. i may end up here for a month this trip and i need to try and get a cell phone. i am not real clear on what i need to do to get one, or get a sim card on a pre-pay set up. also, i have heard that you can get very good rates to other countries, in particular the u.s. does anyone know this to be true? any help would be much appreciated, and thanks in advance!
Ask Loretta.
Thanks for the recommendations, guys. But…
Sancho, if you’re going to be here for only a month then you probably want a pre-pay service. If you can get one. They always want to see your passport. Very often they insist that you have an ARC, but it is sometimes possible to do it just with another form of ID such as a driving license. (Try the ‘myfone’ stores. That’s Taiwan Cellular Corp that I also work with.)
You need a GSM phone, if you have such a thing. Dual-band is fine.
If the regular services won’t help you then I can, but I’m not really set up for very short-term services. It would cost me money to let you have a service for only one month. My contracts are now for three months minimum, but if you terminate early the fee is NT$500.
So you’re looking at a payment of NT$500, plus the minimum spend of NT$840, which works out at about NT$11 per minute on the basic plan - assuming you use all the talk-time you pay for. The pay-as-you-go is marginally more expensive but you don’t have to use that much talk time.
In my favour, I would add the following:
You can sign-up online for my service while still overseas, and if you email to set this up I can have your SIM waiting at the Post Office for you when you arrive. You would have to go there, present your passport to collect it, pay the money, and then call from a payphone to have it activated.
I’ve been avoiding setting-up a short-term rental service, but I’m willing to experiment with it to see if it’s viable. Drop me a line if interested: admin@TaiwanCell.net