You shall need a phone on the road and also as you reach your destination in Australia. There is a great way to save on your communication expenses, where the benefits are very rewarding, saving you up-to 80% of your costs on making and receiving calls on your mobile. You may decide to take your handset with you, which you are using at home. For one, that handset has to be on roaming and secondly and most importantly, your handset must work on the GSM frequencies operated in Australia. But stop for a moment. Have you thought of those call charges, the incoming and outgoing? Do you know that when you are on roaming, you need to pay a roaming charge per minute on top of the calls that you receive and make? Do you remember those days when you had to call up your friends and your family back home from the your hotel telephone? It was expensive, wasn’t it? The roaming incoming and outgoing calls are as expensive if not more.

There is a way you can save. You can buy the specific prepaid SIM card for Australia. You will get an Australian phone number and along-with it you will get a limited credit for your talk time. Not only that, all incoming calls are free, no matter where it generates from, and the charges for your outgoing calls are the same as the locals pay. There are no roaming charges what-so-ever. You do not have to worry about your bills arriving at the end of the month, for, the call charges are all prepaid, which helps you to keep your expenses within your budget. There is no contract for you to sign. When you are down on your call time credit, just walk into any shop in Australia, and buy a recharge voucher/coupon to top up your credit. These are available in different denominations, so that you can choose as to how much credit you would require. The prepaid SIM card for Australia is the most convenient and economical way to keep in touch with your friends and business associates, locally and abroad and also it is the cheapest way to call your family back home.

Now, the most important of all is that, you have a prepaid SIM card for Australia, but would it work with the phone that you have? Australia uses Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) operation. Even if your handset is a GSM compatible mobile phone, it is unlikely that it will work in Australia. Over 600 countries in the world use GSM. Except North America and Canada, most the part of the world operates on different GSM frequency band. North America and Canada has limited GSM operation, and the bandwidths they operate on is not usually the one's you have in most of the countries in the world. The solution would be to rent a phone which is compatible with the frequencies in Australia. If you are a regular traveler, it is worth considering buying a quad band mobile phone, which will cover all the GSM frequencies used in the world, including North America and Canada

There is one more thing that you need to take care of. The mobile handset that you take with you needs to be SIM unlocked. This would mean that the handset would work with any SIM that you put in. When you sign a contract with a service provide, you might get a mobile handset free along-with your SIM card. This contact binds you to a certain period of time, before which you cannot leave the services of that particular provider. Under these circumstances, the mobile handset that you received free of cost is SIM locked, meaning that you can only use the SIM card that you received from your service provider. This will not allow you to use any other SIM card. You need to make sure that the mobile phone that you are taking with you is SIM unlocked, which will allow you to use the prepaid SIM card for Australia.

In order to learn more about prepaid SIM card for Australia and renting or buying an appropriate mobile handset, vist www.planetomni.com or appropriately, www.planetomni.com/FAQ_sim.shtml for prepaid SIM card for Australia and www.planetomni.com/FAQ_gsm.shtml for renting or buying the appropriate GSM phone.