My twitter, minutes before boarding the plane to Frankfurt: “oh god… What are Ponzi and I going to do for phone service when we get to Germany in 12 hours?! AT&T will gouge us!” One of our Live regulars (Mike-Linux) pitched in a few solutions:

The best thing you can do is buy a prepaid SIM card with some money on it. most of the loose SIM cards will have like 10,- euro already on it. I don’t know if your iPhone is already hacked, so u could use another SIM card. if not maybe u should buy a cheap phone for 20 or 30 euro’s. This solution won’t be handy though if you’re calling to America. But I don’t know what AT&T would charge you, when u would call from Europe to America.

Internet-wise, u might could sign up for a temporary T-mobile account? There are a lot of wireless hotspots in, and around Frankfurt.

I saw this on TV today and I think it would be really good solving your phone problem. It’s called Cellity. read the 12 steps on this site, and you’ll see that it saves up to 90% of your phone costs, even with your phone and SIM card from AT&T. Cellity also can make group calls up to 6 persons at once. Also has a solution for when u are staying in another country in a hotel.

Frederik from Jahjah also submitted suggestions:

The easiest way to avoid all roaming charges is to get a local SIM card, you can get them at any T-Mobile, E-Plus, O2, Vodafone, Aldi, SimYo, Fonic or whatever store for 10 bucks, it comes with 10 bucks credit which you can use to make local calls while you are there.

To make any calls back to the US or anywhere else, simply use your local number and Jajah, as Jajah will call you and incoming calls are free of charge in Europe only the cheap Jajah VoIP rates apply and you can call any phone anywhere in the world, they don’t have to be online.

Don’t use your US phone / number in Germany, active and passive roaming charges are outrageous. For frequent travels I recommend a MAXroam SIM next time. Have fun in Germany, Frankfurt is not pretty but got a nice nightlife, check out the Cocoon club. Get back to me if you have any further questions regarding Jajah, Germany or Frankfurt ;-)

Ultimately, I just fired up Skype on the MacBook and phoned through it. A bit unwieldy, but quite practical and affordable from any location.

Making Phone Calls in Europe