How to iPhone roam without losing a bundle

Assuming your iPhone is unlocked, Orange UK will sell you a prepaid micro-SIM card that will enable you to access data services throughout Europe. The cheapest way to do this is with Orange Extras. Under Extras, a £5 ($7.95) credit will give you four megabytes of mobile internet in western Europe, or 30 minutes of talk from the same location.

In other parts of Europe, Orange charges £4 a megabyte for 3G data services. If you're cautious, using Google Maps, retrieving emails, checking bank statements and updating your Facebook page is probably going to burn through 20-50 megabytes in a month, although if you get excited this would easily blow out.

If your service provider happens to be Telstra, the charge for 3G data services while roaming overseas is $0.015 a kilobyte, or about $15 a megabyte, plus the flag fall of $0.50 for each data session. If you were to sign up for a plan with a European service provider, you could take advantage of cheaper rates. For example, Orange's Europe Travel Data Bundle - not available to pay-as-you-go customers - gives you 50 megabytes of data roaming throughout Europe at a cost of £40.85, valid for 30 days, but locking yourself into a contract with a foreign service provider is probably not going to be in your interests.

If you want to use your iPhone to access the 3G data services, the cheapest solution is to confine your usage to when you have access to free Wi-Fi, which could mean hotels only, or eating a lot of Big Macs.

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