A while ago I posted this on here somewhere...
A year after that was written, I had another opportunity to test it on a visit to Croatia.
It appears to still work as before, and is still well worth doing, but a few things appear to have changed:
The phone shop(s) now charge HRK 45 for doing those setup steps for you 
The SIM card lasts 9 months (not 12 months) and the shop claimed it was always 9 months
The data now lasts for about 1 month; longer than previously
The previously extremely helpful T-Mobile Croatia customer service is now totally useless and arrogant and refers you to a useless website for information
Whether Croatia's new EU membership is anything to do with this, I don't know.
Unless you spend a lot of time in Croatia or plan to download half of the internet, I found it to be not worth the hassle. With Croatia's EU membership, the roaming tariffs have gone down 80% or so.
Most networks in Europe offer special holiday tariffs where you get a flatrate data/voice/sms for a certain number of days by paying a bit extra.
If the EU Commission prevails, we will have no roaming fees at all in a year or two. Keep your fingers crossed, it's not that often they do something for us consumers!
Most networks in Europe offer special holiday tariffs where you get a flatrate data/voice/sms for a certain number of days by paying a bit extra.
Yes - £3/day in my case (Vodafone UK). The Euro Traveller.
And it was always available in Croatia too, pre-EU.
However that is quite a lot for a longer stay. And you have the contract to pay on top of that, if you want a wifi router functionality with infractucture (not ad-hoc) wifi. The T-M package (among others) is PAYG so for say €10-20 you get a couple of gigs and that's all you pay.
Of course, as always, there are multiple ways of doing this, and the nature of things is that costs of the several options tend to converge over time. But when I look at my Vodafone bill for a month when I have been abroad, versus one when I haven't, the difference is at least 5x. All one needs to do is to send a single SMS and that triggers the £3 charge for that day. So the value of these packages is highly debatable. The networks love it, of course...
Yes - £3/day in my case (Vodafone UK). The Euro Traveller.
Our food discounters Aldi and Lidl (I've seen them in the UK as well) have prepaid EU roaming cards that cost 4,99 Euros for a week. That seems to be the cheapest option presently and our company supplies them to crews when they spend more than two or three days abroad (now that we use iPads for everything).
Clearly those two firms have a more upmarket (I mean not absolutely rock bottom) image in Germany than here in the UK
I don't think you would be buying food for your bizjet passengers there
Is the €5 for unlimited data for 1 week, and do they block any ports e.g. POP3, SMTP, PPTP VPN?
There are only 4 mobile phone networks in Germany and whether your SIM card is from Aldi/Lidl or Louis Vuitton doesn't change anything about the network. Just like buying Milka chocolate at Aldi will get you the same chocolate as anywhere else but you might pay less.
Alditalk charge 4,99 € for 60 MBytes of data in the EU within 7 days. The regular price is 0,49 € / MB in the EU and 0,99 €/MB outside the EU.
i had a tmobile sim in croatia costing 15 kuna a day for flatfee data .. And the possibility to use my phone as mifi router.
I find it very little hassle and still worth while
The vodafone offer is oke ..but only valid on vodafone networks. Croatia is great but france not.
I bought a mobile hotsport for Croatia, I put in a local SIM and connect my iPhone/iPad through the mobile hotspot but still have my germn number active.
