Communications matters before leaving Sg

There are some communications stuff you can and might want to do while you are still in Singapore.


If you have family members who are going to miss you big time (like your old folks wanting to talk to their grand children) or you have a business & need to be contactable all the time, you can buy a global Sg telephone number at talk.pfingo.com. For $30 a year, you can buy a Sg number that anyone in Sg can call you at. This works not just in Oz but anywhere on Earth as long as you have an active internet connection. You will need to install a VoIP/Sip app on your phone such as sipdroid on an Android device and the setup was pretty straight forward. Someone in Sg calls this number like a normal local Sg number whenever he/she needs to talk to you. One word of caution though: the call quality depends on internet quality. You can also top up credits at pfingo which allow you to call any Sg number at 2cents per minute. When I had my Sg number and whenever I was unable to answer a call, the caller could leave a voicemail and the voicemail was emailed to me as an audio file attachment. Unfortunately due to infrequent usage, I have terminated my Sg number so I am not sure if the voicemail still work as such. But I thought it was pretty cool.


If you need a Sg mobile phone number in Oz to receive SMS (for whatever the reason), you can consider getting a Starhub prepaid SIM card. Receiving phone calls through roaming is just overly expensive but I believe receiving SMS is free. This is irrelevant if you are keeping your Sg teleco subscription. For $15, a new Starhub prepaid SIM expires in 180days. You need to top up $18 after 180 days to keep it alive for another 180 days. In other words you will need to spend $36 annually to keep the phone number. You can then use this credit to activate data so that you have access to Internet whenever you visit Sg. And btw Starhub prepaid also has this wonderful thing called Unlimited Social Messaging. Please note you have to keep this Starhub SIM active. Else Starhub will suspend it due to inactivity. You will then have to visit Nex, Vivo or Plaza Singapura Starhub with your IC to re-activate it.


I have a dual SIM mobile phone which I find useful in Australia and when I visit Singapore. When in Sg, I will have both a temp Sg SIM card and my Oz SIM card active at same time. So I can receive Oz SMS thru roaming all the time in Sg eg when I need to logon to Oz bank websites and reminder SMS from MyGov. Of course this is irrelevant if you don't mind carrying two devices. Please note as 2G network has been shutdown in both Sg and Oz, older dual SIM phones are useless for this purpose. If you are on Android, newer phones that runs on Snapdragon 820 or MediaTek X20 should be fine.


If you have a friend in Australia whose address you can borrow, you can order SIM cards to be sent to his/her address. In that way you will be contactable the day you land in Australia. Please see post on mobile in Australia. And having a letter with your name and address is also very useful to get certain things done in the first few weeks.