There are several Japanese companies which have a national broadband. Domoko,au,and softbank. It's important to know if co-workers or the person you expect to often has what kind of cell phone company they use. All most every company provides the option of free talk and text if a recipient is using same company. otherwise the caller needs to pay 42 yen per a minutes which is about 50 cent.
My husband and I decided to head to on-base and off-base to see what kind of offer that these places have. If someone decides to check off-base, he/she needs to understand and speak in Japanese because the works in off-base doesn't have nice English proficiency. the workers looks like they understand English but kind of hard to deal with the situation since the conversation will be about all the plans and those plans does not easy to pick up.
On BX, there are au and softbank. what I hear about softback is they providing cheap plan without having basic fee. however, they just started to provide service on base, It is hard to get the good connection everywhere on base. on the other hand, au has pretty good connection and it's national wide broadband. and there is pretty kind works is at. she has good English proficiency which makes a lot easier to deal with problems and everything. on base, au provides the discount which was about 1500 yen. As you know, any type of discount can't be discouraged. If there is any problems with phone, plan change or PCSing, they are pretty good at taking care of those stuffs too. which we choose the au on base to get a phone. (galaxy 3, currently about $100 per month for a year then on the 2 year period the fee is going to be only $57 because at that time the fee charged for the buying galaxy phone itself will be paid off) If we would like to buy different phone after 1 year of paying the unit fee for galaxy 3, we can just go ahead and purchase different unit with having the unit fee on the top of $57.
Before we decided to head back to BX, we wanted to know what kind of option we can get off-base. we went to docomo,the company that few of my husband's co-workers use. At docomo, have break the unit fee down to 12 or 24 months. their basic fee with data plan, talk, and text plan is about 8500yen. on the top of that the unit fee which ever it costs is included. so the price is kind of fixed at about 9000 yen.
the au at off-base, we couldn't get any help from that place. the person tried to call to on base au and kind made us to talk to her in English even though I said I can understand Japanese fine and I just want to know what kind of plan they have. the worker there seemed very uncomfortable doing her job there. when we asked the option for rental phone which i am currently using, she looked panic and in and out of the inventory room quite often. so the au off-base was totally out of the list. even though the lady was not very helpful, we tried to get the prepaid phone there because they have kind of cute style phone. but the cute phone was kind of pretty expensive to just but it one time, so the worker recommend to us to go to "geio" which is the place like "goodwill" on U.S. they sell the used stuffs at cheap price. they have games, CDs, and clothes too. I got refurbished phone at $15 and charger for $5
Back to au on BX, I found out that if I get phone and just put money in, I need to activate at off-base and there will be $3000 yen of activation fee every months. It's better if someone gets rental phone because there is no activation fee every months and don't need to put much money in it. so for me, i will only talk to my husband and no friends here yet. only person that i call will be free phone at text so I decided to get rental phone and phone back to return tomorrow.
this is pretty fantastic day today, these are the recommendations that I found today.
1. If you want to get a phone, Go to AU on BX
- better service because they speak english
- easier overall because they deal with military stuffs all the time
2. rental phone is better off than but phone and get a money in
- cheaper without activation fee every 3 months
- no need to put bunch of money (prepaid puts 3000 yen no matter what)
We tried to go to tai food place but it was closed at 3pm. (preparation time for dinner)
