My wife and I spent last week vacationing in Florence (Firenze), Italy. A truly incredible place for art and architecture. Naturally I wanted to have mobile web access while on vacation. The only affordable way to do this is with a local SIM card. Because I was arriving late the Saturday before Easter and knew the mobile shops were going to be closed until at least Monday, I decided to go the eBay route. There's always a bit of risk buying anything on eBay although I've never had a problem including buying a couple of SIMS in the past.
I found a WIND SIM from a British seller for 9 pounds plus 4 for shipping. The SIM arrived promptly and was still attached to its card with the PIN and PUK codes covered with scratch off paint so it was obviously unused. I figured I was all set.
When I landed in Pisa I fired up my Nokia N95 with the WIND SIM ready to go. Except that I didn't go anywhere being greeted with the ominous message "SIM registration failed" I made sure the card was seated properly and retried with no success. The SIM was either bad or unactivated. I spent Sunday soaking in the renaissance watching the Easter festivities around the Duomo.
I discovered that Easter Monday is a holiday in Italy too but several of the museums and all the historic churches were open so I had plenty to do. Tuesday morning we had a reservation for Uffizi Galleries, so after absorbing the greatest collection of Renaissance paintings in the world, I was ready to hunt down a mobile shop to see if I could get my SIM working, or if not buy a new one. Just a couple of blocks from the Uffizi I chanced upon an independent mobile dealer with a little paper sign, in English no less, advertising WIND prepaid SIM's. I told the proprietor my story and he punched my SIM number into some sort of WIND online system for dealers. The verdict; my SIM was really old, had never been activated and the number assigned to it had been recycled and given to another customer. My SIM was now expired and ineligible for activation. I purchased a new SIM for 10 Euros. The only documentation I needed to buy the SIM was my passport. The dealer activated it but warned that it wouldn't be functional for a couple of hours.
The shop was:
Porta Rossa Telefonia
Via Tavolini 3/R
That's just a block off the big pedestrian-only Via Calzaiuoli that runs between the Duomo and the Uffizi. I didn't get the proprietors name but he spoke English and was friendly and helpful. If you need to buy a SIM in Florence I highly recommend Porta Rossa Telefonia
The next step was getting a data package working. From reading Martin Sauter's Wireless News blog and the forums at the excellent PrepaidGSM.net site I concluded that the two Italian operators with the best data rates seem to be WIND and TIM. Martin's reported problems with WIND's 3G network but it's the cheaper of the two and my US model N95-3 doesn't have the European 3G frequency anyway. So how cheap is it? WIND normally normally charges a fairly high € .003 /KB (€ 3.00/MB) for GPRS, Edge or 3G data but they currently have several deals that are much less expensive. The cheapest called "Wap No Limit" gets you €750.00 worth of data each month for a mere € 3.00. That's about 244 MB which I figured would be more than enough for a week of web surfing and email checking.
When I put the WIND SIM in the phone it setup the access points and added a browser link to the WIND mobile portal automatically. Pretty slick, I wish every operator did that. This feature may not work on all handsets so if you need to set up the data access point manually it's very easy. The only thing you really need to set up is APN name of internet.wind. No proxy, login, password or DNS settings are required.
Setting up the Wap No Limit deal is somewhat involved but not hard. Here's how.
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posted by Dennis Bournique
April 4, 2008 @ 7:22 am
7 View Comments
