Is there good cellular phone coverage in Iran+ Pakistan
 

Hi overlanders,
does anybody has idea about the coverage of the cellular phone in Iran and pakistan?
My telephone is a new blackberry, GSM , GPRS with Vodafone contract.
I do not mind about reading the mails, but I care about making phone calls and reading/sending SMS.
I do not plan to leave the main roads (maybe excluding the KKH which I consider quite wild).

thanks
roberto

Buongiorno Roberto

GSM possibilities in Pakistan are limited (status Sep2007) and depend quite a bit on your provider and his roaming contracts (Voda was a little better then O2 ..if I remember right). Also field strength is quite ok just at the BIG cities (Islamabad/Pindi), along the main roads its so-so or bad, but on the countryside there is no coverage :thumbdown:… especially at the northern parts of Pakistan and the KKH (except on the top of the Kunjerap pass, there you can dial in to a Chinese network :thumbup1:!

Maybe coverage is better now, but I presume not. Hope this info helps you along;… or just enjoy your trip to Paki-land without using any communication network :yes:

Greets
Jörn

Roberto,

Last summer there was no cell phone coverage at all in Iran. Not a single moment, right after crossing the border in Bazargan, going to Tehran and then north to Turkmenistan. I presume the same for the rest of the country.

Iranians are amazing. No words to express how great they are.

Regards,

Esteban

PS: Nothing to do with the question, but foreign credit credit cards do not work at all either (so get cash before).

i guess i will have to get a satellite-phone?

Good Coverage
 

Hi bomboliere :-)

Just to let you know we have traveled through Iran and Pakistan at the start of this year and had fine telephone coverage for more or less the whole time, we are on an Estonian sim card (just because that was the one we set up to work abroad) and our friends that were using a Dutch sim card were also fine we used the phones to contact each other regularly. In actual fact our sim card has been fine all the way until now in Timor Leste (East Timor) where we get emergency calls only! :-)

My brother also tried to get me to buy a satelite phone but after looking at the initial cost of the phone along with the cost of calls, weight and space it takes up we decided it wasn't for us. Also when we looked at it we didn't really expect to be anywhere remote enough to not expect mobile network coverage or where we weren't expecting there to be quite regular traffic traveling in roughly the same direction.

Anyway, guess it is up to you but if you are basing your decision on whether or not you will usually get mobile coverage I would say no worries (well not so much just now in Iran though!).

Hi, I am currently in Iran, we have a quadband phone with u.k sim and no reception at all. Stopped at the border and hasn't come back. Sorry to dissapoint.

EXTRA: If you have an unlocked phone you can easily buy an Iranian sim an use that in the phone though - very cheap calls too!

Thats the way to do it. Why spend all that money using your European sim?

In China, Pakistan and India I bought local cards and it cost 2 Euro Cents a minute to phone France/UK.

I paid €16 for a card in Pakistan and India and both included €10 of credit.
The Indian SIM's (Airtel), go to roaming charges when you leave the state they were bought in so the cost went up to 8 Euro Cents/min.... Stil lots cheaper than using your home card.

John

I don't think that your phone not working in Iran at the present moment means that they don't accept European network phones, I would have thought that it had more to do with the current political situation there and the fact that they are closing down communication with the outside world while the demonstrations are taking place. We have friends that are in Tehran at the moment and they are saying that the government is trying to block all international calls and access to certain internet sites.

I agree that a local sim card can be useful and less expensive but it is possible to use non Iranian sim cards in Iran and I think we were using a tri-band phone.

Just had a look on the Vodafone website and found these two links, they list the cost (you will have to change the settings probably for your contract type as I searched with PAYG so the pricing will be different), what type of coverage plus type of phone required (single band in both cases) and phone requirements, anyway here are the links:

Iran - Internet access abroad and international roaming charges – Vodafone

Pakistan - Internet access abroad and international roaming charges – Vodafone

You can also see a couple of coverage maps for Pakistan, as stated above the coverage is mainly based around the towns and cities but definitely there :-)

Seems like a damned good reason to buy local SIMs to me

John

Great to hear that other cards worked, but Spanish vodafone SIM card did not work at all (nor British vodadone, I cannot 100% assure it was vodafone, but British SIM). And last summer '08 there was not the current political unrest and the communication restrictions.

Maybe due to a band issue (crap cell phone, nod quadband), but we didn't even considerd it because they worked fine in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, etc (but so expensive even just send a SMS!!!). Definitely, being that the case, much better to buy a local card.