<p>Am moving from US to montreal for mcGill.
Looks like I need to get a new phone, and a phone plan.
What's the best way to go about it?
have one phone for when I go back home to US and another Canadian phone with a Canadian plan? Which plan/service provider? Which Phone?
Thanks!</p>
<p>When I lived in Canada, I used one of those “top-up” phones where I didn’t have to have a plan. It worked well, and then during the times I didn’t use it, I wasn’t paying for it. You may consider that for either Canada or the US.</p>
<p>There are some problems if you try to use the same phone for the 2 countries because Canada uses a different frequency for phones. (or at least they used to.)</p>
<p>Prepaid “top up” phone is a great suggestion, that is what we use for our D. Petro-Canada is the one we have. You need an unlocked gsm phone. You can buy the sim online but they will only mail it to Canadian address or you can stop by Petro-Canada gas station, I believe most of them sells the sim there. You can be on the monthly plan while in Canada to get the cheaper bulk rate, and turn it off to pay-as-you-go when you come back home for long vacation so that it costs nothing when you are in the US and turn it back on to monthly plan again we you get back to school.</p>
<p>For US number, I recommend getting a google voice number. You can attach this to your cell phone as a secondary voip line with an app like groove-ip for android phone. There is a way to do it in iphone too but I don’t know the specifics of how to do this. Basically you will have a second US phone number on your cell phone that can be used to do calling and texting through wifi and wireless data plan and all completely free or until google start charging for it. This way your Canadian friends can call/text your Canadian number and your US friends can call/text your US number and not get charge for much more expensive international calls.</p>
<p>Select the right phone that supports the correct frequencies for the gsm systems of the companies you want to be with in both Canada and US. It takes a little research but there are phones that can do that, or better yet, get unlocked and easily rooted gsm android phone like the google nexus 4. There is another trick that you can do with Petro-Canada which involves rooted android phone to get very cheap data plan. It requires a bit of hacking, do a google search and find out how to do that if you want.</p>