Tech bytes for tea?

First thing I did when I exited the gates in the Arrival Hall in Suvarnabhumi Airport in Bangkok was to get myself a pre-paid SIM card that gave me a local number for voice calls and seven days of mobile data broadband at 299 THB.

Immediately after exiting the gates in the Arrival Hall, you’ll come upon this telco shop that sells pre-paid SIM cards, as well as other mobile plans.

Here’s where you can grab an affordable and convenient pre-paid SIM card that gives you mobile broad band as well as voice calls, and a local number.

I’m here for seven days, so I was delighted to grab the 7-day SIM card that costs 299 THB, or S$12.

You get seven days of free broadband mobile data as well as 100 THB of free call credits, which gives you 100min of local talk time at 1 THB/minute.

The seven days are calendar days and includes the day you bought the card, ending at 2359hrs on the seventh day.

What I found useful was not only the free call credits but having a local number that you can give out for others to contact you via local calls.

My wife can now call me at local rates, through her autoroam.

Otherwise, she would have to make an overseas call just to get me on my Singapore mobile number – you know sometimes we get separated in crowded places, or we deliberately split up to visit different shops etc.

If she were to call my roaming Singapore number with her roaming Singapore line, she’d have to pay a Thailand-Singapore overseas call charge, and I’d have to pay for a Singapore-Thailand autoroam rerouted call and a local incoming call charge.

That’s a double overseas call charge.

With a local number, she pays just a local call charge while my incoming calls on the SIM card is free.

The local number is also useful when making enquiries or bookings with local joints that require them to call back to confirm reservations or reply to questions.

The prepaid SIM card also offers attractive international call rates starting from 1 THB/min for countries like Malaysia, UK and US; and 1.5-3 THB/min for Singapore – depending on the call quality you choose via the call prefix.

There is unlimited data for the seven days although after the initial 1.5GB, the speed is throttled down to 384 Kbps.

1.5GB for seven days should be adequate for most people for a week considering the telcos in Singapore start at 2GB per month for their mobile data plans.

Thanks to the pre-paid SIM, I found that I was as connected while vacationing in Thailand as I was back at home in Singapore – both on email, social networks and in terms of keeping up with the news.

And if you drive during your vacation, you’ll find the mobile data useful for using Google Maps for turn-by-turn navigation.

Add to that the ability to Google for information and solutions when problems crop up along the way.

The disadvantage though is that, we no longer go through the digital detox that we usually go through during our holidays and have to put in conscious effort to keep off our mobile phones to pay more attention to each other during the vacation.

By the way, if you want to remain contactable on your regular number and use the local SIM card at the same time – without carrying a second phone, you’d need a dual-SIM smartphone.

I brought along a Motorola Moto G (2nd Generation) Android smartphone for the trip and it worked like a charm.

Tags: airport, Bangkok, broadband, Changi, Hua Hin, Mi-Fi, mobile, Moto G, Motorola, prepaid, SIM, Suvarnabhumi, Thailand, Thailand 2014, tips, travel, True Move

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 13th, 2014 at 11:00 pm and is filed under Events, Gadgets, Holiday, Howtos, Internet, Network, Phones, Promotions, smartphones, Thailand 2014, Tips, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.