Telephones: mobile and voice-over-IP good, payphones bad
If you hail from the northern hemisphere you won’t believe this, but South Africa probably has better cellphone (mobile telephone, GSM or cellular) coverage than your home country. More than 95% of the country – geographically, not by population – has excellent signal coverage. You really have to go way off the grid, deep into the Kalahari desert, for example, to be out of reach.
So no, you don’t need a satellite phone and yes, you can bring your mobile phone and roam. If you aren’t a regular traveller, just make sure the roaming option is active on your account. And remember that roaming charges are set by your home operator and likely range from the exorbitant to price-gouging status.
An example of modern portable telephone.
A better solution may be to rent a cellphone or just buy a local connection for your own handset. Every international airport in South Africa has a cellphone rental kiosk which will kit you out with an active handset that you can give back when you leave. But it’s definitely cheaper to buy a starter pack and to use pre-paid airtime. Less than $10 will get you a SIM card on one of the networks; from there on out you can buy airtime from any just about any retail outlet in the country, or from automatic teller machines, or by credit card over a mobile browser, or from vending machines. It’s more accessible than you think.
Oh, and if your cellphone supports a data connection then you’ll have a good time connecting to the internet. Our mobile data rates are pretty cheap and coverage is universal and pretty quick – if you can make a voice call you can get at least an EDGE connection, if not 3G or better.
Also relatively easy to find (in metropolitan areas) are internet connections good enough to make telephone calls over. If you stay in a decent hotel you should have WiFi access (which you will have to pay for, though), good coffee shops similarly have coverage. Internet cafes are somewhat scarcer these days, but again good hotels will have “business centres” with computers you can use at a price.
Whatever you do, don’t count on using payphones. They are hard to find, more than half require pre-paid cards and a good percentage are broken at any one time. If you absolutely must use a payphone, try looking for one indoors in a shopping centre, where your odds are better.
