Way to Russia Talk Lounge

reen · Frequent Guest Joined: 10 Feb 2005 Posts: 15

hello. i'm going to be in st petersburg for 4 weeks in june/july. i would like to have a phone on me while i'm there. i have a couple of questions. is it possible to buy a pay-as-you-go sim card? if so, how much would that cost? do i need to unlock my tmobile phone if i plan to use one of tmobile's partner networks?

thanks very much in advance.

Ronie · Posted: Fri May 13, 2005 10:09 pm Post subject: simple here

you can get sim card and pay nothing , only for minites you talk, and put like 5 or 10 dollars into account as deposit
and may be use on your phone ( if you not from Japan or States)
All incoming and outgoing phone calls are to be paid

Leonid · Posted: Mon May 16, 2005 8:37 pm Post subject: Re: mobile phone in st petersburg

Yep. If your cell phone is not a GSM one, you'd have to buy yourself a phone. A simple one would be about 70 bucks. St.Petersburg and Moscow cell phone operators work on a pre-paid basis. You buy a "subscription" which is about $15, and get a SIM card with it, and surprise! You get about the same $15 on your cell phone "account". Incoming calls from other mobiles are usually free, outgoing calls to mobiles are about 5-7 cents per minute. Incoming and outgoing calls to landline phones are about 14-16 cents per minute.

To add more money to your cell phone account, you drop by one of the numerous point of sales that accept payments for all local cell phone operators.

Major operators are "Megafon" and "MTS", you are unlikely to run into a "no signal" situation with them. There's a whole bunch of others but the coverage is not that good.