[mrbarlow]

May 2007 saw our first ever trip to Canada when we went to Toronto.

I certainly wouldn't have fancied the high roaming fees for even minimal usage but I realised that my girlfriend and I would often want to do different things so it was important that we could remain in contact - and cost effectively.

So I purchased a couple of Fido prepaids from a nice Canadian Ebay seller; as requested we got Toronto (416) numbers and each had $25CDN of credit. I opted for the "Anytime" tariff since the phones would most likely get their use during the day-time hours.

We were both using our spare Nokias for the Fido SIMs: both were tri-band only therefore missing the 850MHz frequency used in North America. However from advice given by helpful people (PhotoJIM here being one) I understood that in metropolitan areas, 1900-only would be fine.

From the time we switched our phones on after arriving in Toronto, everything seemed to work fine. From what I can remember, we pretty much always had good levels of signal in the city and (metro aside) were always able to call/sms each other.

There were occasionally areas en route to Niagara where signal strength was a little less good but for the most part, the absence of 850MHz never seemed to cause us any problems.

As for usage of Fido's service itself; we only really made calls and sent sms. I don't really remember using voicemail nor data: we took a laptop and had wifi at the apartment so were were sorted for web/email and international calls were made via voip.

I did register for the online portal on Fido's website but I don't remember that much about it other than it telling me how much credit I had etc.

So, an enjoyable trip and one on which getting sorted with Pre-paid SIMs was ABSOLUTELY worthwhile.

Next up (and in the Euro forum): Christmas in Tallinn, Estonia.