How to Set Up Your Phone for International Travel

You’re getting ready to travel abroad, and you’ve put off figuring out how you’ll have phone service while you’re gone. What to do, and how to do it? Here are four questions you need to answer before making a decision about your phone use abroad:

- Jill Duffy

Will your phone work in the region to which you’re traveling?

Do you have an unlocked phone?

Does your carrier offer service, usually through a partner, in the region where you’re traveling?

 How much does a local SIM card cost?

If you don’t know the answer to the first three questions, the easiest way to find out is to call your phone carrier or stop by a store. If you’d rather figure it out yourself, let me warn you that figuring out the answer to the first question in particular is a royal pain, especially if you want to understand the technical details behind it. All you really need to know is that there are two standards in mobile phone service: GSM and CDMA (although you could learn what makes them different, if you’re so inclined).

GSM is used pretty much all over the world. CDMA is thankfully falling out of fashion pretty quickly, so if your phone is fairly new, you don’t have to worry. But if you do have a CDMA-only phone, it’s going to cause problems when you travel. CDMA is really only used in the U.S. for Sprint, Verizon, and U.S. Cellular phones (AT&T and T-Mobile use GSM). If your phone uses GSM or both GSM and CDMA, you’re probably fine. If your phone is CDMA-only, it may not work outside the U.S., and you should look into using a different phone. There are a few options, and I’ll get to those in a moment.

As far as whether your phone is unlocked or can be unlocked, if you’re on a contract, there’s a good chance your phone is locked. There are other reasons a phone might be locked, too. Sometimes you can unlock a phone by yourself by going to your carrier’s website and following some instructions, but you’ll save yourself heaps of time if you can drop by a store or call the support team and let them handle it for you.