I am a big fan of the country of Turkey. My family and I truly enjoy our Turkish friends, food, beaches, and summer weather. I am also a big fan of mobile phones and staying connected whenever possible. Therefore, on our second summer vacation in two years to the Bodrum area I set out to not only get a Turkcell SIM card but to also (with the help of my friend Baris) document as much as possible for other English-speaking visitors to Turkey who wish to get their mobile going. The advantages are simple: Avoid both costly roaming fees and asking your Turkish friends to dial internationally to reach you right in Turkey.
Choosing Your Carrier:
Turkey has three major mobile carriers.
- Turkcell: 900 MHz GSM (Supposedly the best coverage, not often disputed)
- Vodafone: 900 MHz GSM
- Avea: 1800 MHz GSM
I chose Turkcell.
Turkcell Hazir Kart SIMPlus Prepaid Sim Card Package
Whereas most western European carriers are on a combination of 900/1800 MHz, Turkey’s carriers have either 900 MHz or 1800 MHz but not both. What that means is that even if you have an unlocked mobile phone (which is required to use a Turkcell SIM card), you’ll need to have one with 900 MHz to use Turkcell.
All quad-band mobile phones (850/900/1800/1900) such as the popular Motorola V3 RAZR will work fine as they all have 900 MHz. If your phone is a European model, you are also in good shape. All single band (900), dual-band (900/1800), and tri-band (900/1800/1900) European mobile phones have the required 900 MHz.
Where things get a little sticky is if you have a US non-quad-band mobile phone. Cheap dual-band models (850/1900) won’t work at all as they don’t have 900 MHz. US tri-band models such as T-Mobile/Samsung’s SGH-T509 with 850/1800/1900 will indeed work with most western european carriers on the 1800 MHz band but won’t work at all with Turkcell as it lacks the required 900 MHz band. If you have a US Tri-band model you can only choose Avea as your Turkish carrier and I have no experience to offer you. To see which bands your phone supports try looking up your model number on GSM Arena or Mobiledia.
One of Many Independent Mobile Shops
Collection of Turkcell, Vodafone, and Avea Sim Card Packages
Buying Your SIM Card and Credits:
You will have no problem finding an independent mobile phone shop to sell you a SIM card. Be prepared to show your passport and have a photocopy taken when purchasing a SIM card. While the prices/packages can vary from shop to shop, they are all rather competitive (except for the one at Istanbul airport which is a complete rip-off at about 3x market price). Here’s a typical sample:
- Turkcell: 23 YTL (New Turkish Lira) for SIM + 100 Kounters (Credits)
- Vodafone: 17 YTL for SIM + 100
- Avea: 18 YTL for SIM + 100
Typically, the Turkcell package is labeled “Hazir Kart” which means “Ready Card”.
Make sure the place you buy it from activates it. I ended up having to wait 24 hours for the guy to get around to activating my card.
Additional Kounters are even more ubiquitous and available at most food stores, convenience stores, gas stations, etc. A 100 Kounters card costs about 15 YTL.
About Phone Registration:
Turkey has a rather unique policy in which the government requires all mobile phones to be registered. If you don’t register your phone after a certain period of time, the carrier (e.g. Turkcell) will refuse to register your phone on their network and you won’t be able to make/recieve phone calls or SMS messages at all. Exactly why they do this is a bit of a mystery to me but I think it has something to do with controlling the market for stolen mobile phones.
To be 100% sure you don’t run into this problem you will need to find an “official” Turkcell shop to register your phone. These are not always easy to find and can be a rather long distance from where you are staying in Turkey. In my case the nearest was in the main city of Bodrum which was a 30+ minute drive away. Each phone has a unique identifier (the IMEI number) that is used to register your phone.
You can risk not registering and hope that your service isn’t temporarily shut off until after you leave Turkey. If you do that, it is likely the next time you return to Turkey you will not be able to use the same phone without registering it. Anecdotally, it can take 2-3 weeks before you get your warning message. Look for an SMS starting with “Cihaz kayit eisi…..” and then look for the date in the text. The date is when that particular phone (not the SIM card) will stop working if you don’t register it.
Card Expiration
As is usually the case with prepaid SIM cards around the world, inactivity will cause your credits and eventually your card/phone number to expire.
With Turkcell you must add credits every 90 days to keep everything working. Regardless of your credit balance, not adding additional credits for 90 days will you cause all of your credits to expire and stop outbound calling from working at all. You will get an additional 90 days in which only inbound calls are supported. After that, you have another 30 days in which the phone doesn’t work at all but your number is reserved for you in case you do decide to add more credits and start the clock all over again. After the full 90+90+30=210 days passes your card is useless and should be discarded.
Therefore, if you buy 100 credits (15 YTL) every 90 days, you will need to be spending about 60 YTL per year to keep your card completely working. Not too bad compared to T-Mobile US, one of the better prepaid deals in the world, which requires a $100 credit in order to stay valid for 1 year.
Collection of Prepaid Credit Re-up Cards Being Sold by a Street Vendor
Turkcell 100 Credit Prepaid Re-up Card
Using Your Card and Turkcell Services
The card will come with a nice booklet with easy to follow instructions on how to use Turkcell’s services. Unfortunately it is written entirely in Turkish. Here’s an English translation of the instructions for all the key services (Thanks again Baris!):
Getting started: Dial 8090 to start things off, follow the instructions (press 2 for English). Your card will start working and you’ll get confirmation of your 100 credits. On some phones you will also get a new menu added. On my Motorola K1 KRZR it was added under “Tools/SIM Tools”. The menu was all in Turkish and therefore not much use to me.
Adding credits from an additional Kontor Karti that you bought: Dial 8090 which will now be in English or just dial *122*NUMBER-FROM-THE-KONTOR-KARTI-CARD#
Checking your credit balance: *123#
Account access for additional features: Send an SMS with the word “SIFRE” to short code 2222
Get MMS settings automatically added to your phone: Send an SMS with the words “MMS YOUR-PHONE-MODEL” to 2222. So for example, if you have a Nokia 6600 you would send “MMS 6600″ to 2222. I needed to send “MMS V3″ which is a RAZR to get my KRZR working. The settings are the same. YMMV on this one if you don’t have a phone in their database.
Get GPRS settings automatically added to your phone: Send an SMS with the words “WAP YOUR-PHONE-MODEL” to 2222. So for example, if you have a Nokia 6600 you would send “WAP 6600″ to 2222. I tried V3 again but it sent a message back in Turkish saying it wasn’t possible to do this on my phone automatically and to manually do it with instructions from the Turkcell web site.
Setup voicemail: Set your phone to forward unanswered calls to 7532. Your default password will be 1234. I didn’t try this feature. There is another interesting option which loosely translates to “Who called me?” in which you forward to 7585 and then when you turn off the forwarding you’ll get an SMS with the list of callers. The example given is that you go to the theater and want to know who called while you were unavailable.
Collect calls: dial *135*53XXXXXXXX# where XXXXXXXX is the number you want to call. The “53″ seems to indicate that you can only call Turkcell numbers collect but perhaps it is worth trying others.
Transfer credits to another prepaid card: Send an SMS to 2277 with the number you want to send the credits to followed by the quantity of credits. For example “535XXXXXXX 25″ sent to 2277 would send 25 credits to 535XXXXXXX. To confirm that it went through successfully send an SMS to 2064 with the word “EVET”. You can only transfer between 5 and 70 credits at a time with a maximum of 250 monthly. You can check how much you have transferred in the given month by sending an SMS to 2277 with the word “KONTOR”.
For Help services (in Turkish): Dial *133#
Good Luck
I do hope this guide is helpful and that you have a safe and enjoyable trip to Turkey!
