Hong Kong report
 

Just wanted to share my roaming and prepaid SIM experience during a recent trip to Hong Kong:

My family and I decided to head off to Hong Kong for (western/January 1) new year's, so I brought along my phone with my home network SIM card (Sun Cellular, Philippines). Once I landed at Hong Kong International Airport, my home SIM card logged on to SmarTone (my home network's preferred roaming partner for HK), and I was also able to manually log on to all the other HK networks (CSL, PCCW, 3 and People's/China Mobile HK) and received "welcome SMS" messages from each network that I logged on to.

Soon after I got to the hotel, I purchased a PCCW "Global Reach IDD" prepaid SIM card at the nearby Seven-Eleven with the SIM costing HK$98 but I did get HK$10 off with a coupon that was provided with the subway/metro pass that I bought at the airport arrivals. Local calls were 25 HK cents per minute with "free" (pay only the local rate) calls to select countries such as the US and Canada. I was only able to use PCCW's 2G GSM1800 network as I only had a 2G phone with me at the time, but the coverage was excellent (including the entire MTR subway/underground network) with the only dead spot being the elevator/lift at the hotel where I stayed:p If you do need data, PCCW prepaid also gives you access to PCCW's wide network of WiFi hotspots around Hong Kong at HK$20 per day for unlimited use.

Overall PCCW's service was excellent and after buying a few more SIM cards for my family members travelling with me, we saved quite a bit on roaming charges as our calls and SMS to each other were now local and didn't have to do a roundtrip back to the Philippines just to reach each other down the street. What's more, the prepaid credits last 180 days from last recharge so by topping up (which can be done online via credit card) at least HK$50 twice a year, you can keep the SIM card active.

I hope my experience will be useful for those travelling to Hong Kong because at those low rates (especially for travellers from North America), paying upwards of US$3 per minute for roaming is just madness:D

Thanks for the report. I am soon traveling from N America to HK & looking at getting a local number & then continuing to use it in other parts of the world.

I will check out their website looking at rates & conditions..