Wasel cards are prepaid and can be bought in 25 and 40 AED denominations. To keep your Wasel card activated you have to pay a renewal fee of 100 AED a year (about $30 US)
The Wasel card should roam automatically if it is still activated with credit, but check with whoever you are buying it from.

Etisalat provides an excellent ‘my account’ feature so you can add credit to your account and also renew the annual fee.

Read more information on Etisalat’s website

I use a CDMA mobile phone on the Yemen Mobile network connected to my laptop. I have a post paid Yemen Mobile contract which is what you need to access this service.

Once you have got the phone and laptop configured to talk to each other (not difficult but let us know if you need help) you need the following details in your PC connection settings:

Phone number: #777

Username: ymobile

Password: ymobile

It costs about 15 riyals a minute and the speed faster than dialup.

For Yemen Mobile CDMA network:

You need a passport, a local address e.g. company or sponsor, and about 2,000 yemeni riyals. You can go to most local phone shops or goto the Yemen Mobile offices in Al Tahrir square or on Haddah Street to get one. You can get either a post paid or pre paid SIM card.

For local GSM networks:

MTN and Sabafon offer both post and prepaid SIMs. Same procedure as above. The MTN office is on Sharah Beirut off Haddah Street. The Sabafon office is near the Al-Waleema restaurant complex on Haddah Street opposite Haddah Hotel – ‘haddah funduk’.

Prepaid Cards can be bought all over Yemen and come in denominations of 300, 500, 600, 800, 1000, 2000 riyals.

There is a small mark-up on each card e.g. 800 + 80 is 880 but you will pay 900 riyals as it gets rounded up.

• Yemen Mobile : CDMA
• MTN (previously called Spacetel) : GSM
• Sabafon : GSM
• Yu : GSM

All Yemen GSM networks operate on 900 mhz so make sure your phone is at least dual band and covers this frequency…all European handsets do and most others will if they are ‘tri-band’.

I do not use a ‘foreign’ CDMA phone in Yemen so i dont know how roaming works. I do however use a locally bought CDMA phone which cost about $90. However i do know that if you have a spare VERIZON phone it can be hacked to work on the CDMA network here by reprogramming the ESN. If you want to do this contact Matt at Anisa Yemen

To use mobile data services e.g. GPRS you will need to have a post paid contract. This is set-up in the same way as aprepaid contract but you have to pay a larger deposit – usually about 10,000 riyals.

If you want your Yemen SIM card to roam on a foreign network e.g. your home network so you can receive text messages and calls you will also need to take a post paid contract.

GPRS roaming for Blackberry use is a bit hit and miss.

It cost me 120 saudi riyals which is about $30 US. It came with 100 riyals of credit.

I slipped it in my phone and it was activated immediately. This is useful for calling your local contacts and giving to people back home etc.

The SIM roams internationally too.