February 7th, 2007
When I moved to Holland I got myself a local cell phone subscription. I had no idea which one to choose so I went with the one that seemed to be fairly cheap, the vodafone prepaid deal. Prepaid means (in case the terminology is non standard) you buy cards with credits and only pay for what you spend.
I rarely use my phone at all, so it had been working fairly well for a while. (I noticed cell phones work the best when you don't use them.) Then I went to Poland for Christmas with about 20+ yuros of credits, and calling from inside the terminal to a Polish cell phone outside the building ate about 15 bucks in a minute and twenty seconds. I would have made the call much shorter, but the connection was rubbish. Then I noticed to my chagrin that sending an sms back to Holland cost me about a buck each. Insanity. In contrast, with my Norwegian cell phone subscription sending an sms from Barcelona to Holland cost me about 30 yurocents.
So when I got back I was on 5 yuros. And that's not a lot, so I was going to buy some credits, only to realize that they don't sell them anywhere anymore. In Albert Heijn they have a variety of cards for other providers (€10, €20, etc), but for Vodafone they only sell cards of 40 bucks. What the hell is that, a down payment on a house? I'll retire before I use up those credits.
You do know that Vodafone are affiliated with Telenor and I am sure you didn't have Telenor in Norway.
No, I didn't know that. I'm not exactly well informed about cell phones in general, I don't like them. In Norway I had a Netcom subscription though, I would stay away from Telenor for many reasons though.
Turns out Vodafone has a phone service to upgrade your credits, as well as an online service. I asked someone who also has Vodafone. He doesn't think it's an improvement at all though so be careful and make some green tea before you try :D