Re: when will s5 be global with verizon? it is on all other cellular providers
KBTron
Enthusiast - Level 3

Just thought I'd add a followup from the trip to India.

There appear to be a near-dozen cell phone/sim card rental places in the arrivals area at Indira Gandhi airport. Walked up to one labeled "Alltel". For approximately $20, I got a SIM card with about 45 Rupees on it and 1.5 GB of data, good for a month. Warning: While they will make a copy of your passport if necessary, they'll like a copy of your passport that you bring with you even better. Finally, you'll have to have the address you'll be staying in in India. That'll be checked, by them, before the SIM card gets activated, usually the next day.

Results: A 10-minute call to the U.S. cost about 8 rupees; at 61 Rupees per buck, that's a heck of a lot cheaper than Verizon. Calls inside India are around IHR 0.02 a minute; remember, it's 61 IHR/$, so that's tiny. The phone worked fine around Delhi and Agra. I was making a lot of phone calls and so was just about dry by the time I came back. I didn't come close to using up the data plan. And $20 for 1.5 GB is a heck of a lot cheaper than Verizon's $200/GB international plan.

The phone was in H or H+ mode on data most of the time, with the occasional "E" symbol displayed.

So: No question, the phone is unlocked. It's back in the States now with Verizon's SIM installed.

Half wish that the Alltel SIM worked in the U.S.. Haven't tried it, but wonder about the inexpensiveness of it all.

KBTron

Re: when will s5 be global with verizon? it is on all other cellular providers
wiw
Enthusiast - Level 2

Did you mean Airtel?

Could you elaborate on what you had to do (exactly) on your phone to get voice, text and data to work in India? I have the S5 too.

I am traveling there - landing in Delhi - at the end of this month & would really appreciate any details you can provide. Thank you.

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Re: when will s5 be global with verizon? it is on all other cellular providers
KBTron
Enthusiast - Level 3

Just got your message. It was all pretty straightforward.

First: Having wandered the Delhi airport waiting for my plane to board, I can safely report that in the arrivals terminal there's around 5 or 6 places that all sell SIM cards. If you don't like one, take a hike to the next. My partner arrived in Delhi first, happened to see the Airtel booth, which had a couple of guys running it, went there, liked their act, and bought a SIM. I showed up about an hour later, he pointed the place out, and I went over and got mine.

As mentioned above, you'll want two things for sure:

  1. Copy of your passport main page.

  2. The address of the hotel at which you'll be staying. Some previous directions on the web stated that this should be some kind of official document from the hotel; the Airtel guys had no problem looking at the paper reservation I had printed out, noting the address, and writing it in their forms.

The moves to get the SIM into the phone are straightforward, and you should do them at the counter, they will help.

  1. Shut down the phone, all the way.
  2. Pop off the back cover.
  3. Remove the battery.
  4. Slide the SIM card out. Note that it's under the memory card, so it's a bit of a hassle to drag it out of there.
  5. Put in their SIM card. (Note: They had a mini-SIM. The guy pulled out something that looked like a hole punch, fitted the SIM into it, went, "Snap!", and he suddenly had a micro-SIM. Weirdly enough, despite that, it worked!)
  6. Replace the battery and back cover and fire up the phone. After it's booted, it'll recognize the local telephone network. However, you won't have access until the following day; bureaucracy and government requirements will kick in. Once the local guy saw that it recognized the network, he called it a day.
  7. On the following day, around noon if memory serves, the activation kicks in. You get a text, for one thing.
  8. At this point the telephone and texting will be working. Next up is getting the data plan up. This is where my memory gets a little fuzzy.
  9. Go to Settings, Other Networks, then Mobile Networks. I believe I changed the Preferred Network Mode to GSM/UMTS. When you have their SIM card in there, you get more options than when you have the Verizon card in. For one thing, you get a choice of network operators, and you should select Airtel.
  10. Next up is Access Point Names. Too complicated: Here's Airtel's description of how to do it. You'll note from their description that the APN  will have to be added, so you'll see Verizon's APN as well as Airtel's, but you'll have to hit the radio button to make Airtel's active.

Once I did all that, data came right up. Phone numbers in India were the local versions; calling the U.S. was standard international calling procedures. As I said, it was cheap.

If you use another vendor besides Airtel, you'll have to follow their procedures. But the process was pretty simple. Once my phone was up I would see "U" and "H", depending upon where I was, with the little up and down arrows, rather than the LTE4g that sits in my phone around here.

For what it's worth I noticed that there were Airtel offices hither and yon outside the airport. My experience in India is that the Indians use English as their second language; in fact, there's a heck of a lot more signage in English than Hindi!

Good luck!

KBtron

Re: when will s5 be global with verizon? it is on all other cellular providers
wiw
Enthusiast - Level 2

Thank you so much for the detailed description. I really appreciate it.

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Re: when will s5 be global with verizon? it is on all other cellular providers
wiw
Enthusiast - Level 2

I arrived at New Delhi airport and used the Airtel kiosk to get SIM cards for both of us.

Differences from the instructions above:

step 7 -  now, they ask you to wait 2 hours and give you a number to call to activate your phone. The phone automatically registered to airtel - didn't have to do anything. My phone's Preferred Network Mode was already set to Global.

Step 9: I did not have to change any settings on my phone (Samsung Galaxy S5 with latest verizon updates as of 11/29/14).

Step 10: I entered the APN information from KBTron's link above. After selecting the Airtel APN, I rebooted the phone & data started working just fine. Stable all day today with H & H+ as the speed.

Re: when will s5 be global with verizon? it is on all other cellular providers
nickcage49
Newbie

This is the second time Verizon screwed me up.

I live in Bangkok and have a Verizon account.

One of their lovely salespeople sold me the LG G3 telling me it would work anywhere.

Sure enough it worked, but no 4G on True Move in Bangkok.

So I returned it and payed a restocking fee when I came back to the states a month later.

Picked up the Galaxy S5.  Again, the sales rep said it would work.

This one worked for exactly one day and then stopped working.

According to the Samsung Service Center where I took it, they said the Verizon model of the phone WILL NOT WORK HERE.

Verizon isn't it about time you stopped lying about your phones?

Unfortunately the only phone from Verizon that has worked for me out here is my iPhone 5.

Now I need to see if Verizon will take this back and swap it for an iPhone 6.  Glad I didn't sell me iPhone 5.  Of course the wait is going to cost me a whole lot of resale value on that.

I HATE VERIZON!  THEY SCREW YOU OVER AT EVERY TURN AND THEIR SERVICE IN THE US HAS GONE TO CRAP.

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Re: when will s5 be global with verizon? it is on all other cellular providers
Morganw215
Newbie

So I'm going to the dominican republic in 2 weeks and I'm trying to figure out what I need to do to get my phone to work? I have a sim card for there.

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Re: when will s5 be global with verizon? it is on all other cellular providers
telveer
Contributor - Level 1

1) Yes. It is a global phone, and it should work overseas. I used the phone in India for about a month this summer using a GSM provider in India

2) The provider overseas should support at least one of the bands on the phone. Majority of them do.

3) Once you insert the overseas SIM and restart the phone, it will pick up the other network settings. You may be prompted to accept some settings from the overseas provider

4) Once you return home and insert your Verizon SIM, it MAY NOT work. This is because the APNs and other settings for Verizon may have been deleted or modified. If this happens to you, Verizon does not have any tools to allow you to restore the APNs. The only option is a factory reset, at which point it will re-register itself with Verizon and continue working

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