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World roaming on your cell phone
When packing for an international trip, there are a few essentials that you should always take with you. Besides a passport, a power converter, and a translation dictionary, the near-ubiquity of cell phones makes them yet another essential item for your suitcase. Whether your travels are for business or pleasure, a cell phone can be a huge convenience when trekking around London; Lagos, Nigeria; or La Paz, Bolivia. You can keep in touch with clients, fellow travelers, or the folks back home as well as make hotel, dinner, or show reservations or send "wish you were here" camera phone photos or you can simply keep the phone for emergencies. Besides, since you'd rarely leave home without your cell phone, why should you leave the country without it?
Before you head off for the airport, there are a few things you should know. Not all cell phones will work abroad, and not all carriers offer roaming coverage in every country. Before you make or receive transborder calls, you'll need to find out if you can do it, where you can do it, and how much it will cost. In the pages that follow, we'll answer all those questions to help get you on your way.
The RIM BlackBerry 8830 connects to both CDMA and GSM networks.
Know your technology
The first step in understanding world phones is to know the difference between two main ingredients in the cell phone alphabet soup: GSM and CDMA (see our cell phone buying guide for more information). In short, GSM and CDMA are the main cell phone networks in use in the world today. GSM, or Global System for Mobile Communications, is the predominant global technology and is used in Europe (where it's the standard), Canada, Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, as well as much of Asia and the Middle East. In the United States, AT&T (formerly Cingular Wireless) and T-Mobile also operate GSM networks.CDMA, which stands for Code Division Multiple Access, has less worldwide coverage than GSM, so your choices will be more limited using a CDMA phone. One of its biggest markets for CDMA is the United States, where it used by Verizon Wireless, Sprint, and several smaller carriers such as U.S. Cellular.
Outside of the States, you can find CDMA networks in Canada, Mexico, New Zealand, China, Taiwan, South Korea, parts of the Caribbean and Latin America, and a handful of other countries. The United States also has a third network technology called iDEN, but it's exclusive to Sprint-Nextel and is present in very few nations.
