If you’re travelling around South East Asia, it’s much cheaper to get a DTAC Thai SIM card for your mobile phone than use your SIM from back home – you can also use the DTAC Thai SIM in other countries too
Previously I’ve written about using a Thai SIM card in your mobile phone to make the cost of keeping in touch much cheaper. I do a lot of travelling around Asia, and up to now have always use a 12Call Thai Sim card while I’ve been abroad. It’s not worth getting a new SIM when I’m only in a country for a couple of days, and the international roaming charges for Thailand are expensive but not outrageous. It’s ideal for a traveller who wants to avoid changing their number with each new country they go to. However, I had a lot of problems with my 12Call SIM abroad – friends couldn’t text me, I couldn’t text them, sometimes I couldn’t even cal l them – every country I went to seemed to have a new set of problems, which was very tedious.
When travelling to Hong Kong and Hanoi recently I tried out a DTAC SIM Card and this worked much better. The DTAC card seamlessly picked up the roaming network in both Hong Kong and Hanoi and I was able to make and receive calls and texts without any trouble at all. This is a real godsend – the only drawback is that the operator who set my phone to roaming (you need to call DTAC to enable this) told me the roaming only works in 26 countries…. but I can’t find out which ones. I guess it’ll have to be trial and error from now on — but at least I know it works in Hong Kong and Vietnam.
You can get a DTAC SIM from any mobile phone shop in Thailand straight over the counter as well as top up cards. You need to call 1678 to speak to an English-speaking operator to enable your phone for roaming.
You can also use your DTAC SIM to plug your phone into your laptop and access the Internet anywhere in Thailand via EDGE/GPRS – see Mobile Internet Access in Thailand for full details.
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I got stuck with no way to up my simcard while roaming in Singapore and it kinda sucked, so I set up the site thaiprepaidcard.com that lets you get top up with your paypal or credit card. 12call, Dtac, or true. Hope that helps others that may get stuck in the same situation.