Small Eurotrip in Telecommunication and IT view
Wednesday, August 30th, 2006During august 19 until august 30, i was in a trip to euro, with main destination: stokholm. I was passing 4 countries, singapore, france, sweden, and spain.
In this article, i would like to share my journey experience from IT and Telecommunication perspective. There are 3 points here, the first is GPRS roaming, followed by 3G, and the last is atm banking.
1. GPRS Roaming
Singapore is the most friendly country. At least, my kartuhalo (Telkomsel postpaid sim card) and xplor (XL postpaid sim card) were successfully doing gprs roaming to singtel and starhub.
Paris, only xplor that can do gprs roaming, and it was only to France Orange network.
In sweden, both kartuhalo and xplor can do gprs roaming into vodafone SE. But, seems there was a roaming problem during Friday August 25, no gprs roaming can be done at all.
In Spain, no gprs roaming was possible.
2. 3G
This thing can give you a trouble especially if you are using 3G phone. Usually, some operator restric their 3G resources by not allowing you to roam into their 3G radio network. This is normal but unfortunately, some 3G handset do not have any configuration option to keep the handset in 2G and does not try to find 3G nerwork at all. Why is this feature so important? If your handset found any 3G network, the handset will automatically try to attach to the 3G network, and if the network rejects you, you will get a bouncing network, 2G-3G-2G-3G-… and so on
Or the worst case is the handset would not try to find any available network again because it think that the network was already rejecting you, so why it should try to attach to the same mcc and mnc network, even in 2G network. In my M600i, the handset was finally staying in 2G after 4-5 times trying to attah to 3G. And now, i have found that in the new firmware, there is an option to shut off the 3G capability. It is a very usefull option.
Ok,back to network, singtel is allowing their roaming partner to their 3G network, for both voice/video call and 3G gprs.
The other operator that allowing you to roam to their 3G was Telefonica Movistar Spain but movistar is only allowing you to use circuit switched services. No 3G gprs at all. I were dissapointed with this.
3. ATM banking
I did not have any idea about since when Bank Mandiri ATM card works with atm machine outside Indonesia because when I tried it last year in Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, all of them were failed.
I just did some trials in stickhol,spain and paris, and the resulst was impressing me. My atm mandiri card is working well at all the places.
The last thing that i want to tell you is my stupid experience with telefonica moviestar prepaid card. When i realized that there was no possibility to do gprs roaming in spain, i tried to buy a local prepaid card, and because i knew that movistar also has 3G network, i choosed the prepaid card from movistar. After doing some tarzan language with the seller, finally i got the sim card. The bad thing was not stop there, the manual book was in spanish completely. Movistar does something unusual to enable the sim card. Before i did the activation, i was ABLE to do voice call but NOT for SMS and GPRS. In order to make sure about what is my sim card phone number, i tried to call my telkomsel number and as you can guess, “private number” was shown in my handphone. I tried to do sms from movistar number to telkomsel number, and then i realized that sms and gprs was still blocked because i had not done any activation. After some trial and error and guess the meaning of the instruction in the manual book, i got one number that able to make my sms and gprs active after that number dialed. Usually the operator is only need registration for gprs and maybe the worst case is operator blocks all of its services before any activation done. Movistar activation method is something new for me.
I also put some photos in:
-rendo-
