vB Easy Archive - International travelling with the 8525

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International travelling with the 8525
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Posted by: SrchingForSignl

READ THIS if you're planning on leaving the U.S. with your Cingular branded Hermes (8525.)

As you no doubt know, you'll need to unlock your phone first. You can follow the somewhat tedious directions at xda-developers or you can pay one of the dodgy shops such as imei-check to do it for you (bad experience at the latter.)

Second, you'll need a SIM card that will work in your destination country. Your Cingular SIM should work, but you'll be paying Cingular around a buck and a half a minute for the pleasure of speaking. Better to use somebody like Telestial who can FedEx to your home a SIM card that is intended for use in your target country. I'm paying .39/minute which isn't great, but a lot better than what Cingular wants.

HERE'S THE PART YOU DON'T KNOW:

*Part 1*
Cingular removed the tab called 'Band' in Settings | Phone. Unless you've used WM5 before, you wouldn't even know it's missing. You'll need a registry editor such as Resco's excellent product to fix their nasty hack. The wiki on XDA-developers has more details on how to hack the registry, but in brief you need to set:

\HKLM\Software\OEM\PhoneSetting\
ShowUMTSBandPage=dword:1

*Part 2*
It's set to '0' by default which causes the 'Band' tab to vanish. Once it reappears thanks to this registry repair (this is not a "hack," it's truly a "repair") you will need to go into 'Band' and change 'Select your GSM/UMTS band.' from 'Auto' to 'GSM(900+1800)+UMTS(2100)'

Of course, if you happen to know if it's one of the other two you can use those. But if you're in Europe or AustralAsia it probably isn't.

SPREAD THE WORD.

Here are the companies who DON'T know this who SHOULD:

1) Cingular
2) imei-check
3) Telestial

If you're travelling overseas, those are the people you'd be talking to. Disgraceful, isn't it?

Posted by: Pinched

One of my users left for Hong Kong today.
I called my Cingular rep last week and for an extra few dollars he enabled international coverage for that phone.

Seemed real easy to me`

Posted by: nskgti23

Why do you say IMEI-Check is dodgy? Florin has been a HUGE advocate for unlocking windows mobile phones. Of course he is going to charge for his services. He is usually the first to be able to unlock most new phones coming out. Second, why would you pay someone to send you a SIM when you can buy one at most airports and not have to deal with some middleman? As someone who has traveled extensively, I find it very easy to get SIM cards in countries I visit and if you do a little research before you leave you can get pretty great pricing. I think my calls back to the US from Thailand were about $.22 a minute. Maybe even a little less.

Posted by: belewlaw

I always carry two phones when I travel. I use my primary phone with the Cingular SIM card (you do have to have international calling enabled) so that clients can reach me easily and a second phone with a local SIM card to make and receive local calls and cheaper international calls.

Posted by: bodeh6

Wouldn't auto automatically use the 900/1800 GSM bands when traveling overseas as most phones that have that option do like the Motorola phones?

Posted by: emuyshondt

I just spent a week in Germany and didn't have to make the registry change above. The phone just worked. I had previously unlocked the phone by using the code I got directly from Cingular but I did not get another SIM card this time.

Posted by: bodeh6

Quote:

Originally Posted by emuyshondt

I just spent a week in Germany and didn't have to make the registry change above. The phone just worked. I had previously unlocked the phone by using the code I got directly from Cingular but I did not get another SIM card this time.

It worked because what I said earlier. Auto automatically selects the frequency the phone works at based on the SIM and the towers it receives signal from.

Posted by: theepp

Quote:

Originally Posted by bodeh6

It worked because what I said earlier. Auto automatically selects the frequency the phone works at based on the SIM and the towers it receives signal from.

In an area where there is only one GSM provider, this would probably be sufficient, but in an area where there is more than one, each using a different band, then it is an issue. I recently traveled to Grand Cayman with my unlocked V551 (used expressly for overseas travel now) and a Digicel SIM card bought from Telestial. While the band was set on Auto, the phone found the closest and most powerful tower, which happened to be from C&W. Needless to say, the phone could not make any calls, as C&W uses a different band than Digicel. Thankfully, a very helpful rep from Digicel just changed the band setting to the correct one (instructions provided by Telestial had the wrong settings) and it worked like a charm. Given that, the information provided by the original poster is extremely useful and I have gone ahead and implemented this, umm, hack on my 8525.