Pay As You Go: The Recharge

So, as I mentioned, I am doing all my phone and internet here pay as you go. I don't put a lot of Euros on at a time, so I have to recharge a lot. For both my phone and my internet, I have finally gone to pay cards.

My phone is with TIM. When I first got the phone, I put five Euros on there. That lasts me over a month! The first time I recharged, I went to a TIM store, where you fill out a form with all your details, and they charge you at the store. OK, that worked, but it meant going to a store and potentially waiting in a line. So the next thing I did was go with the website. You have to create an account, put in all your details, and charge your credit card. Let me say, putting in your credit card details online is fussier here than in the US. In some cases, you can't include a middle initial, even if it is on the card itself, but after some fiddling I got it to work. Still, it was a bit of a pain, and took far longer than I would have expected.

My internet is with 3 (Tre), and at first I was recharging online using my credit card details, running into the same sorts of issues. This month, I couldn't get the online form to submit for me at all.

The solution to my recharge problem in both cases has turned out to be pay code cards. Each company has their own name for it, like "Carta3", but it's all the same. They have the card system at many stores, including my local Penny, where I shop on average twice a week, where you simply grab a tag to show the cashier that says how much you want to recharge on what network. The tag is just for them to bar-code scan, you don't keep it. So they add the cost of the recharge to whatever else you are buying, it shows up on your receipt as any other line item. You can pay with any accepted payment method along with the rest of your stuff. And what they give you then is a 16 digit code in the form xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx printed onto a separate receipt. This receipt has all the pertinent data, along with instructions on how to use that number for recharge.

There are several options to recharge with this card depending on the company and your device. For my internet, one of the links on the company's landing page is to recharge, and you just say you want to recharge with a paid code and type in that number. For the phone, you can text the code to the company's service number (free of charge) or call them free of charge and type it in. You get a text a few minutes later showing your new balance. Easy. So this will be how I recharge my phone in the future.

I don't know if we have an equivalent system in the US. I think for some pay as you go stuff, you can buy cards, but they are physical cards you can take, instead of a simple code on a receipt!

Pay As You Go

Some friends (a couple) just switched their cell phones to pay-as-you-go to cut back on their bills. It makes a lot of sense for some people, especially if you have a landline home phone.

In Italy, it seems like most people go pay-as-you-go for cell phones. I know a few people who have really cheap cell phone monthly packages, but you can stack these with pay-as-you-go packages. For example, there's a "young" package that includes 1000 texts and 1GB data a month for 6 Euros, but you have to pay-as-you-go for voice minutes. There are some people I know who carry more than one cell phone from different brands, with different uses for each. One might have cheaper international rates, one might have cheaper texts.

There's also a thing in Italy (and I think in most of Europe), that you only pay for outbound calls and texts, not receiving. So you basically are paying for only half your messages and calls. For calls, you only pay if you get connected (also true in the US, I think?), so between that and the pay-as-you-go part, there's a whole "missed call" phenomenon. Like, if you are waiting for someone, they give you a missed call when they arrive, as a signal.

Google Voice/Talk

So, I am just getting into the whole calling-with-the-internet thing. I think when I first go to Italy, I am just going to forgo the cell phone thing and use internet calling. I have a Google Voice number. Yesterday I spent some time getting things working on my laptop. At first, I was trying to call a number in Italy through my laptop, and I just wasn't getting it to work. I instead did the thing where they call your phone (in this case my cell phone) and connect you through there. After some fudging around, I figured out that I wasn't getting the call to work through Google chat because I didn't have the plug-in set up. I've got that patched up now, I did a test calling my cell phone from there.

Calling Italy landlines is 2 cents a minute, but to call a cell phone is 15 cents and up. So, this may not be a good option for calling within Italy. But, calling the US is free from that number, so if I have good internet, that's how I will talk to my family. And I can set up Google Voice to be a phone that rings my computer and takes texts and voicemail. At least the rates are lower than Skype!

Anyone have opinions in the Skype/Google voice debate?