Telecommunication

Cell Phone

You can rent a cellular phone along with a valid SIM chip to use during your stay in Ukraine for $5 a day (plus the carrier’s fees).You will be instructed how to use it and recharge your account using scratch cards with a PIN available in most of the stores. A charger will be provided too and possibly a spare battery. Currently all incoming calls are free; outgoing calls within Ukraine cost about twenty cents a minute; and calls to the US about four dollars a minute. (However, you may want to use cards to make trunk calls rather than your cell phone which is best for calling within the country).

Besides the $5 daily fee you will have make a security payment of $150 which will be handed back to you in exchange for the telephone when you are done using it. This is done in case you lose or damage it. Make sure it is not stolen from you and do not drop it to water please.

Internet Access

There are a number of public Internet locations around most towns in Ukraine; however, you may find it more convenient to stay online from the comfort of your apartment using your laptop. It will be a dial-up connection because broadband is not so popular downtown where you will most likely stay (in major cities, there are large networks uptown where there are high rises but downtown has basically two- or three-storied houses and they are still developing the networks; besides, many ISPs who provide broadband lock it to users’ PC hardware (like cell carriers lock telephones to accept only their SIM chips), so dial-up is easier to use). Make sure to have a long telephone cord because the telephone socket may not be in a convenient location.

We will connect your laptop to our ISP and you will be able to use it every time you need and pay a flat rate of $7 a day. (Part of the fee is to cover ISP’s fees as well as those of Ukrtelecom because it is a dial-up connection. Outgoing calls are charged at $0.41 an hour around the town, and ISPs charge about the same for a dial-up connection; so our costs will be something like one dollar an hour, and we assume that you will need to stay online two or three hours a day).

Long Distance Calling

Unfortunately, you cannot use direct distance calling from your apartment because bills take about a month to arrive and it is hard to monitor how much you spend; so the telephone in your apartment will be blocked for long distance. However, Ukrtelecom charges way too much too. The best solution is to use cards. We can provide you with cheap cards and instruct how to use them to call the USA and other countries.