Cheap Web & Phone Options for Overseas Travel

Reader Karen writes: I am leaving soon on a four-month semester at sea and will be taking my T-Mobile cell phone and my notebook computer. I have very limited free internet on the ship (250 minutes for four months!). I am looking for some options on making international telephone calls and using the Internet on the cheap... or even on the reasonable! I am looking into Skype, but again, Internet charges will incur. Is there a reasonable inclusive plan or prepaid plan? Since we are visiting 10 countries, I need a flexible plan. I have not found one that seems to work.

That's a tall order, so I put out my feelers to the Yahoo! Tech crew to see what we could come up with together. Robin Raskin, our most seasoned traveler, and I came up with these tips. Hope they help.

First let's tackle the more difficult prospect, the phone. As you know by now, using your current cell phone (which, being a GSM phone, will work in most countries) overseas can be prohibitively expensive, with rates of $1 to $3 per minute. Robin's advice is the same as mine: Rent a handset at each port of call, or at least purchase a prepaid SIM card that you can use with your existing phone. You can find cell phones for sale or rent just about everywhere in many countries, from supermarkets to convenience stores. Per Robin: "I just rented a cell phone in Japan for $20 and four cents a minute. Nothing fancy, but very cheap." $300 for four months of international calling isn't a bad deal at all.

Of course, those rates apply only to in-country calling, if calling back to the U.S., you'll still be hit with monster per-minute charges and big bills. (See below for more on this...)

Up next is Internet access, a problem which I figure will be less of a challenge for you. My suggestion is simple: Use the ship's Internet only for urgent needs and stick with Internet cafes and public Wi-Fi hotspots for most of your surfing needs. Depending on how long you're in town, you should be able to find day-, week-, or month-long passes to suit you. Better yet, you might even find a free Wi-Fi hotspot that you can rely on. As you've already discovered Skype, this is how I'd do all my calling back home, just not on the ship. Use it instead when you're on land, after hours. Need to find a hotspot? JiWire offers listings in 136 countries (look them up before you leave and bring printouts).

Robin offers another suggestion to make the most of your ship-bound surfing: Use offline tools to minimize the amount of time you're online. Download email and answer it while disconnected, and use tabbed browsing to quickly download web pages en masse for reading later. Done right, you should be able to get a day's worth of email and news done in five minutes of web time. That might not get you through the whole semester, but it ought to tide you over when a hotspot is nowhere near.

Good luck, and take your Dramamine.