Cell phone (mobitel)

I apologize to you non-techies as this is a very techie post. I will make sure that my next post is a "human interest" story. :-)

First thing I had to do when I came here was get a cell phone, or a mobitel as they call it here. I walked into a cell phone store and was totally confused with the available options.

You pay one rate if you call a fixed line, another rate if you call a cell phone from the same provider, and a third rate if you call a cell phone from a different provider. Rates also varied depending on the time of day and day of week you call. !$#@ I collected the rate information from several service providers and went home to figure out what provider would be the best.

An interesting thing about cell phone plans here is that you only pay when you call someone. When someone calls you on your cell phone, you don't pay. You also don't pay for receiving SMS messages. You may even run out of funds on your prepaid accounts and still be able to receive calls and SMS messages. COOL!!! Sending SMS messages to other countries costs the same as sending them to a local number. Expect to be SMSed by me in the near future. ;-)

After spending an hour trying to figure out which service provider offered the best rates, I had a great idea. Why not use what I learned in my MBA and setup a spreadsheet to evaluate different calling scenarios. That way, I would be able to determine which service provider will be the cheapest. Creating the spreadsheet and performing analysis on the data was way too much fun! I have to do this more often. :-)

Well, after all that analysis, I found a provider with a flat rate (same rate to all phones at all times). Simple works! The cool thing is that you can buy a phone and a card package for about HRK 200 (which is around CAD45). Or, if you have an unlocked GSM phone that will work here, you can buy a SIM card for HRK 25 and that same card will have HRK 25 credit on it. Which means, that the card was free!! In Canada, the card alone will cost you about CAD 15-20.