Prepaid providers with data by country (A-Z)Edit

PrepaidEdit

Prepaid, also known as Pay as you go allows a customer to get mobile access without signing up for a long term plan. This makes it perfect for a person who is only visiting a country for a short time. To complicate matters a bit, the popularity of phones such as the iPhone has led to another requirement on the prepaid plans: data. In order to be able to use the phones as intended, with internet access, you need to get a plan with decent data rates.

More information

SIM cardEdit

When you purchase a prepaid plan you are given a SIM card to be inserted into your phone. Commonly in the mini size, but with the introduction of the iPad and iPhone 4 some providers also stock micro SIM's.

It's possible to cut a mini SIM into a micro SIM, and there are special punches available from cutmysim.com or eBay (search for sim cutter). More information

Phones Network SupportEdit

To check if your phone supports the network of a provider, you can look here: Network Compatibility of common phones

Phone SIM lockEdit

It is not uncommon that a phone purchased together with a plan is SIM locked to that particular provider. This means that when you go abroad and try to use a foreign SIM card it will not work. We will not provide information on how to unlock your phone in this wiki, there are other resources out there that already tell you how.

An important note about chargesEdit

Watch out! You may incur some charges almost immediately after you insert (and activate/unlock if necessary) your SIM. For example, email might try to download in the background once your phone has a data connection, and will be charged at the standard per MB rate. This can be a problem if you buy a SIM with e.g. 10 € credit and try to activate a data package costing 9.95 €. Probably best to close all apps on your handset before inserting the new SIM, and/or completely turn off mobile data. Also iPhone users should disable FaceTime since this seems to send a "hidden" SMS to a UK number 00447786205094 when the SIM is changed. (It apparently does this to register the phone number with the FaceTime servers.) More information on FaceTime's hidden SMS (Google) .

Data bolt-onsEdit

Bolt-ons, boosters and features are all the same name for when you pay a fixed sum for an extra feature on top of your prepaid plan. It is commonly how you get decent data rates. You pay a fixed sum for a certain number of megabytes, once they expire you pay the normal, usually quite high, rates.

RoamingEdit

Roaming is when you keep using your plan from your country of origin abroad. It is usually VERY expensive to do so, cases where users come home to a bill that eat up a month's salary or more is not uncommon. The cure is to use a local prepaid SIM card instead.

Can't find a good data rate?Edit

Some destinations have exorbitant prepaid data rates. So, you might end up relying on WiFi hotspots but still want a local number for making and receiving voice calls. PrePaidGSM lists prepaid sims for almost every country in the World.

What network settings do I need to enter?Edit

Unfortunately, sometimes it won't be enough to simply put the SIM card in your device and expect it to work: it needs to log in to the network. You will need three pieces of information: APN, user name and password. It should be ideally on the operator description page in this wiki, but if it's not try finding in here and if it works, copy it to operator description page in this wiki.

General troubleshootingEdit

iPhone says "You Are Not Subscribed to a Cellular Data Service"Edit

The only known reason for this are incorrect APN/username/password. See "What network settings do I need to enter?" above for instructions on how to fix it.

Contributing to the wikiEdit

A couple of simple guidelines to editing the wiki.