Hi,
I will be visiting Canada for about 5 months and I'd like to get a cell phone to use while I am there. I know that some companies want an SIN or proof of residency which I will not have. Does anyone have any suggestions?
Thanks!!

Virgin pay as you go (prepaid). Phone for $50 or so, includes $10 airtime, top up for $10 a month or so. Works on the bell network, but for less.

www.virginmobile.ca

For 5 months its not worth getting a contract.

You could get a rogers sim card for your UK phone, but then you have to deal with rogers customer disservice department, and its no cheaper anyway.

I'd go with Iain's suggestion. I don't like contract phones, so I've had a Virgin prepay (pay as you go) for the last 2 yrs. Rogers customer disservice dept is only so bad because their staff aren't qualified enough to work at McDonald's.

I'll try that-thanks for the advice!!

Walmart sells prepaid phone packages, about $50 will get you a decent phone with airtime, in my area anyway they stock Fido, Rogers and Virgin. I wouldn't go with Rogers though, we bought a pay as you go sim from them and it's been stupidly expensive and their service is useless!

lets keep it simple: unless you are here for a long time and have a good source of income cell phones as they call it here will always be expensive. the easy experience of buying a mobile in the uk supermarket and of just topping it up with 10 pounds so you keep the mobile as an easy and totally inexpensive way of contact is not going to happen here any sonner i think.
I have a fido phone--my min amount just to keep it going is $40 plus taxes. (i have 50 mins of talk time, any network , billed by sec), the prepaid is not cheap either--it is billed by the minute and if you want unlimited incoming calls on it it cost $1 per day- basically you need a min of $30 to keep it going plus your min $10 voucher.

i had virgin phone for about a year - customer service was ok but the phone hardware wasnt great, reception was poor in winnipeg, and they seemed to be charging me a dollar a day at one point even if it didnt use the phone, plus 25c to text me to say that my balance was low

swapped rogers and its been great, even their cheapest phone works well, if you buy a $100 top up it lasts for a year, rather than depleting each day
havent had to deal with customer service as nothing has gone wrong!

If you, or someone you know, has access to Costco, you can get a Rogers simcard free with your airtime pre-pay purchase. You decide how much to pre-pay ($100 CAD means that the money on the phone will not expire for a full year) and I'm not 100% certain but I think the minimum was about $40. All you need is a UK mobile phone that has GSM dual or tri-band capability and away you go. I find it the most cost-effective way to run a cellphone in Canada (at least until I want to upgrade the phone).

The sim is only 10 or 15 bucks from the rogers store

True - but you have to pay more than the airtime to get it.... the Costco deal means you get the simcard for free and all the money is for airtime.

Reception is a function of the phone you choose more than anything to do with the network. Virgin lease time from Bell, so the network is not the problem. Ive noticed at home that the reception on my cheapo LG is a bar or two better than on my old Nokia, which was infinitely better than my Ericsson was...

In the olden days it was easy with virgin, they only had PAYG, and you only paid for the airtime you used, no monthly 911 fee or whatever. The only thing you had to watch out for was your time credit expiring if you bought small amounts at a time. At $100 the credit is good for a year (as it seems to be with Rogers). I pay only for the time I use.

Now they have all sorts of plans to confuse things, maybe that was the problem?

I swapped to Virgin after countless run ins with inept Rogers service. Just the presence of Virgin in the market has made Bell and Rogers have to smarten up, their service is a lot more competitive now. The only down side to Virgin is the lack of roaming in the US, something they have said is "coming shortly" for at least 4 years now! That doesnt really impact me though.

just to be clear, my cheapo virgin phone had poor reception, my cheapo rogers works well.

I'd forgotten about the no roaming in the US on virgin that was a pain at the time!

yeah the plans are the problem really: I think the brief to the people who designed these plans were something along these lines- lets makes a set of confusing plans that sound different and yet same at the same time...plans that are not easily comparable within say 2-3 mins of quick analysis...etc etc.
The goal is the ake the consumer a looser.

to me its all needless complexity. and the plans are full of fine prints, if you refer back to those fien prints you might see the conditiosn are actually not in your favour at all.e.g unlimited incoming calls- yeah but only local calls.huh.

I realise that, but if the op hasnt got a costco card he needs to know that the sims are not really that expensive

My point was obviously lost...the same phone on a different network would be just as lousy...

Which phone did you have out of curiosity? I was pleasantly suprised by the LG160 that I got after they recalled the 150s. I was expecting more of the same, but the battery life and reception are both much better. The 160 has at least a bar better reception than my wifes cheap virign Samsung, and at home in the "not spot" that makes all the difference.