And On The Way From The Airport… Welcome to Abkhazia

Abch-sm… and a quick follow up on my previous post about my 3G experiences in St. Petersburg. While in some places one can buy a local SIM card directly at the airport, St. Petersburg doesn't seem to be one of them. So as I first had to get to the city before I could buy the local SIM card for Internet connectivity I had to use another means to get to my email after landing and to get the data for my GPS receiver to get a quick location fix.

Using my home network SIM for the purpose was out of the question, roaming charges in Russia are way beyond anything reasonable. But my Toggle SIM offered an almost reasonable rate for small data transfers, 1.34 (UK) pounds per megabyte, altough it thought I was in Abkhazia. Well, not quite 🙂 Looking at the billing records, the 1.34 pounds are charged for every PDP context activation so you better leave the context up if you are reasonably sure there is only little data transferred until you have the local SIM card.