Hi, I’m coming to Taiwan for the next 5 months and I heard that I can bring over my cellphone and just buy a SIM card. Is this true and is there a difference between which kind of phone I bring, or on the service? I have a V-300 Motorola and a Nokia 3360. If I am going to buy a new SIM card, can someone recommend a good cellular service to get?
Thanks!
Leina
[quote=“Leina”]Hi, I’m coming to Taiwan for the next 5 months and I heard that I can bring over my cellphone and just buy a SIM card. Is this true and is there a difference between which kind of phone I bring, or on the service? I have a V-300 Motorola and a Nokia 3360. If I am going to buy a new SIM card, can someone recommend a good cellular service to get?
Thanks!
Leina[/quote]
Any GSM phone that isn’t “locked” should work in Taiwan. If you’ll only be here for five months, you probably should get an “IF” card from FarEasTone. The IF card doesn’t require that you set up an account or pay a deposit, and FarEasTone has the best service for English speakers. At least that was my experience. But I’m not using Chunghwa Telecom because they offer the best service in rural areas.
cheers,
Robert
You didn’t say where you are now. If you will be coming to Taiwan from the U.S. or Canada, then your cell phone probably won’t work in Taiwan because most carriers in the U.S. and Canada use the CDMA system, but in Taiwan, most carriers use the GSM system, which is not compatible with CDMA.
But other than North America, the whole rest of the world uses GSM. So if you will be coming from anywhere other than the U.S. or Canada, then your cell phone should work in Taiwan as long as you can change the SIM card.
If you are in the US and it’s a GSM phone make sure it’s a tri-band, because the US uses 1900MHz for GSM while the rest of the world uses 900 and/or 1800MHz.
Most US GSM phones are 900 and 1900 bands, even though US service is usually on 1900. That’ll work for Chunghwa Telecom as they have both 900 and 1800 service, but some of the other providers here are 1800 only. By the way, US providers now can do GSM in the 850 band, to confuse things even more. Fortunately you can get quad-band 850/900/1800/1900 phones for reasonable prices now.
Actually there are two versions of tri-band phones in the US. The one similar to the rest of the world is 900, 1800, and 1900 used by T-mobile. The other tri-band used by Cingular is 850, 1800, and 1900. The Cingular tri-band phones will limit your carriers since they only have the 1800. Recently there have been quad band phones in the US. Motorola V600 is one of these. T-mobile sells the V600 but they disable the 850 band since they don’t use it.
The USA can’t seem to bring itself to use any standards but it’s own. Like who needs the metric system and degrees Celsius?
Anyway, I have a question. I’ve heard that US cell phone carriers charge recipients of phone calls to pay. Do you happen to know if any of the carriers in the USA offer service like it is in Taiwan, where only the caller pays?
regards,
Robert
“I don’t understand Bush’s anger, really, because I thought his whole plan was to keep gays from having sex. What better way than marriage do you know?”
– Will Durst
The USA can’t seem to bring itself to use any standards but it’s own. Like who needs the metric system and degrees Celsius?
Anyway, I have a question. I’ve heard that US cell phone carriers charge recipients of phone calls to pay. Do you happen to know if any of the carriers in the USA offer service like it is in Taiwan, where only the caller pays?
regards,
Robert
“I don’t understand Bush’s anger, really, because I thought his whole plan was to keep gays from having sex. What better way than marriage do you know?”
– Will Durst[/quote]
The reason that US does not use 1800 and 900 is because the spectrums are used for other purposes. The 1800 is used for military communications and 900 is used by cordless phones at home. To my knowledge there is no cellular service in the US that only charges the caller. Although there are contracted services that have unlimited free airtime for a monthly fee.
Your Motorola V300 should work in Taiwan as we have that model as well but as for the Nokia, maybe not since we don’t have that model number in Taiwan.
The V300 is a world tri-mode so it can be used with all GSM carriers in Taiwan if it’s “unlock” as someone has already said. The nokia 3360 is a TDMA phone so it’s useless outside The Americas.
Hey while you guys are on the subject, my wife was about to get a new phone for use here in Taiwan and I want to know if these Quad Band phones which are also available in Taiwan now will work all over the USA, even in completely Rural areas.
I find that mine and my wife triple-band phones work until we reach a completely rural area and then nothing, yet the people we are visiting all have cell phones with coverage. Do you think it is the 850mhz or the 800Mhz? If it is 800Mhz, are there phones that work on that frequency and can be used in Taiwan too that we can purchase in Taiwan?
GSM service in the US is only a few years old, so the networks are not nearly as extensive as other technologies that have been around longer. The main GSM providers in the US are Cingular and T-Mobile, so surf over to their web sites and look at their coverage maps to see if the places you want service are covered. That said, there’s some places in the US that still have no cellular coverage at all. I drove down Highway 1 between Monterey and San Luis Obispo once and there was no coeverage at all between Big Sur and San Simeon. Also the GSM networks are still being built out, so the situation may be better now depending on how long ago that was.
Most people in the US use TDMA or CDMA type phones, so it was probably a whole different technology that was the reason your friends had signal and you didn’t.
GSM is a TDMA based system (all frequency bands).
The type of technology is similiar, but GSM and TDMA are completely separate and incompatible standards.
If you’re coming from/going to Japan, PHS works. I have 2 PHS phones and I like them much more than GSM. I know that there’s a relatively new service of CDMA in Taiwan in the form of 0982 phone numbers.
Does anybody know more about this??? It seems to have taken PHS a while to spread around the island, but how did this CDMA service appear so quickly. Do they use the same antennas?? PHS antennas look a lot different than GSM, but I don’t knwo what the CDMA antennas look like (if they look different).
The other interesting question—is Taiwan’s CDMA service compatible with others around the world??
What ‘standard’ is TDMA? TDMA is just the underlying technology used e.g. for cellular networks like GSM. The GSM standard defines that TDMA is used for the radio path and describes in detail how exactly (number of timeslots, frequency bandwith, channel separation etc.) UMTS / 3G networks may also use TDMA (in future) - probably called 4G by then.
Since TDMA is also used for e.g. multiplexers in fibre optic networks etc. I would not call TDMA a standard that defines a cellular network.
I don’t doubt there is another type of network in the US that uses TDMA and that is incompatible with GSM, but I am certain the actual standard must have some other name or it’s a propietary system that uses TDMA (but differently specified as compared to GSM).
Who is the operator and vendor of the system actually?
TDMA in the US is slowly being phased out by Cingular. They are overlaying the TDMA with GSM. Before the AT&T/Cingular merger, those two companies were the only major players that run on TDMA.
GSM exists mostly in urban areas and major highways. If you want a better coverage for the US, you would have to go with Verizon. They still have the ability to switch back to analog cell service which covers most of the US.
I did some digging: The actual standards for the old(er) TDMA based system are IS-54 or IS-136 (the latter also modified as TIA/EIA-136), also known as D-AMPS.
Thus TDMA itself is not the standard but rather the underlying technology, just like in GSM, though the term ‘TDMA’ seems to be used synonymous with the IS-54 or IS-136 network(s) in the US.
The V300 is a world tri-mode so it can be used with all GSM carriers in Taiwan if it’s “unlock” as someone has already said. The nokia 3360 is a TDMA phone so it’s useless outside The Americas.[/quote]
Actually if you send it in to the little phone shops that do the fixing, you might be able to get it unlocked. It shouldn’t cost too much to unlock it either.
There’s also web sites that will sell you an unlock code for USD10-20. If you are more adventurous there is free software out there where you can DIY, but for most people it’s probably easier to pay someone to do it.