phone card or cell phone for calls within Europe?

We are planning a trip to Scandinavia and are wondering about our
telephone options. We will be staying on the cheap in places that will
often not have a phone in the room. We are debating between a cell
phone with international service (from ekit or somewhere else, but
preferrably 1 SIM for our whole trip, which includes 4 countries) or
calling card(s) to be used from payphones.

Our questions are:
1) Will it be hard to find a phone to use our calling card from if we
go that route?
2) How good is cell phone coverage if we go that route -- we will be
away from major cities in both Iceland and Norway, for example.
3) Should we buy before the trip over the internet, or try to do it
there? (We are going to Iceland first, and our Icelandic is a little
weak.) ;-)

Thanks!
--Robyn

rob...@shore.net wrote:
> We are planning a trip to Scandinavia and are wondering about our
> telephone options. We will be staying on the cheap in places that will
> often not have a phone in the room. We are debating between a cell
> phone with international service (from ekit or somewhere else, but
> preferrably 1 SIM for our whole trip, which includes 4 countries) or
> calling card(s) to be used from payphones.

I forgot to add (though it is in the subject header) that we want
mainly to be able to make calls within Europe, to let our next host
know when we are arriving, to get directions if we get lost, etc. I
would estimate we would average 1-2 short 1-2 mintue calls per day.

> Our questions are:
> 1) Will it be hard to find a phone to use our calling card from if we
> go that route?
> 2) How good is cell phone coverage if we go that route -- we will be
> away from major cities in both Iceland and Norway, for example.
> 3) Should we buy before the trip over the internet, or try to do it
> there? (We are going to Iceland first, and our Icelandic is a little
> weak.) ;-)
>
> Thanks!
> --Robyn

B Vaughan wrote:
> On 11 Jun 2006 09:01:11 -0700, justforpostings@iprolink.ch wrote:
>
> >If main purpose is to be reachable and you dont expect
> >to many calls, roaming charges will probably be less
> >expensive than a SIM card for each country, but if you
> >plan to use it for frequent calls within the country you
> >travel, a prepaid SIM card for each country or a phone
> >card might be the less expensive solution.
>
> Instead of separate SIM cards for each country, you could get a SIM
> from Riing or a similar service that offers low-cost roaming
> throughout Europe.

Our current phone is a tri-band 850 1800 1900 so I think we'd need a
phone that covered the 900 band to use reliably in Europe. So, we'd
be looking at buying/renting both a phone and a SIM. The ones from HI
Hostelling ekit look like a pretty good deal (they offer roaming
throughout all the countries we'd need), as far as that goes. But it's
still at least $80 before you even make any calls.

If pay phones are easy enough to come by, even with some per-call
charges to make the call to the toll free number etc. it may still take
a lot of calls to catch up to that $80 investment in the cell. We're
probably not going back anytime soon, so I'm not sure that owning the
phone at the end of the trip is worth much to us.

Thanks,
--Robyn