Don't Want Shipboard Cell Service

[tabnab]

If we are aboard ship in Spain and Italy how do we avoid our cell phones connecting through the ships cell phone service. I am planning on using cell phones (both Cingular and T-Mobile but want to go through the local countries provider and not the ships. Thanks for any feedback.

[CruisinGerman]

Dear friends:

 

The seamobile (or equivalent) service is turned off when the ship is in port, so that you roam with the local country's providers and not the seamobile service.

 

However, there is an ambiguous side to this matter, to which I do not know the answer. Often in the Mediterranean the ships never really go very far out to sea and are usually close enough to a coastline to pick up a GSM cell signal from the country it is closest to at that time. I do not know whether, under these circumstances, when the Seamobile system is turned on but there is still a signal coming from a neighboring country, whether the Seamobile system will override that signal and thus make you pay the higher rate, or whether the country's GSM signal will still come through. In this case, that is when you expect you are still within reach of a GSM carrier but are getting the Seamobile service on your phone, I would go into the phone's configuration menu and change the network configuration from "choose network automatically" to "choose network manually". If you do it this way, you should get a list of available networks and thus you should be able to choose the country's GSM carrier (if there is a signal coming through) rather than the more expensive seamobile service.

 

I'm sorry to have only half-answered your question, but I believe my suggestion will indeed help you to always find a local GSM carrier rather than the seamobile service when one is indeed available.

 

Kind regards,

 

Gunther and Uta

[tabnab]

Thanks CruisinGerman for your reply but one of our phones is with Cingular and the sim blocks off the manual selection ability. I guess I'll just have to only turn on my phone on land away from the ship.

[TulsaFlyer]

It will connect to the closest one with the best reception. A computer decifers the signal strength from your phone and will connect to the tower with the best reception (its called a handshake). That should be the one on the ship. When the bandwidth on a tower narrows (to many phones assigned to it) the computer will reassign the call to another tower, or when signal quality decays. There are alot of factors, but in a nut shell that is the simple explaination.

 

Mike in Tulsa

[tabnab]

well that's interesting. i guess i need to be away from the ship to call or somehow make sure the shipboard system is off. thanks for the reply.

[troywest]

Reputable cell carriers will (upon request) provide you with the SIM unlock code for your phone. This should solve any inability to select your vcarrier of choice.

 

It's also important to get the sim code (subsidy lock) removed, because you can then pick up a local "pay & go" type pre-paid sim for any country you visit. These are very cheap, and they allow unlimited "free" incoming calls.