This might be the case with all developing countries, but in Cambodia the mobile phone situation is ridiculous. The market is flooded with too many companies and the crazy thing is that everyone has a different favorite (there must be at least 10 – mobitel, beeline, starcell, smart, m-fone, hello, metfone, qb, Excell – ok, 9).
Anyway, to make it even worse, the most popular phones let you roam 2 or 3 networks at once (that's right, 3 sim cards, 3 call buttons). I was determined not to get into this by just picking the best one off the start… how wrong I was…
When we first got here, a few people recommended Starcell because it had a good 'family' plan where it was dirt cheap to talk with 10 friends. So we got Starcell. That worked for a while until we found that hardly everyone else used Starcell full time. The problem with calling across different networks is that the price is a lot more expensive than calling between the same network.
Finally we got Beeline because you can call all networks for a cheap rate. Then we got Mobitel because it is the most used. Then we got internet which required us to have a Metphone SIM. Somewhere in there we had to buy 2-SIM enabled phones. Then I started new work and guess what… everyone's using m-fone!!! Now I have a 2-SIM phone in my left pocket and a 1-SIM phone in my right and there's nothing I can do about it!!
-steve-
