Which american mobile phone services can be utilized in Spain. I am told NEXTEL works, commnets please.
Also, what about rentals in Madrid?

There is a company I heard of called thuraya which is satellite based, however not for the common folk I would gather.

I must be getting a pyschic vision... I sense someone's fingers nervously twitching.... craving, yet not daring to post a message here in this thread. heheehe...

Jo

In California, Cingulair has tri-band phones that would work in Spain. But, it would be best to buy a tri-band sim-unlocked phone, then buy country-specific sim cards. Cingulair won't sell sim-unlocked phones. You might try Telestial www.telestial.com. I'm thinking of buying a phone through them for use in Europe, then switching to Cingulair for US phone service.
You can easily rent instead of buy on other websites.

(to Jo and MM: :p )

i use at&t. to get the service just request it to be turned on for international calling. the rate is 99 cents a minute. i only use it if i really need it. locutorios are cheaper. if you travel there often you should look into buying a phone with a recharge card. El Corte Inglés has card phones.

Voicestream sells Sim unlocked phones. I just bought a Motorola timeport from them for my trip and will buy a tarjeta from movistar or amena when I get there. Voicestream also offeres international roaming but I think it will be cheaper just to buy the SIM.

I haven't used a movil in Spain - I buy a tarjeta telefonica with the I/C embedded on the card. It provides a cheap and convenient calling mode but if you call a movil in Spain it costs the caller about as much as calling back to the U.S. I have also found it to be very expensive to call from the U.S. to a movil in Spain. It used to be that the person with the movil had to pay that fee but now it's the caller.

The cell phones in spain, you pay for the calls you make, not the ones you receive. I have a friend who travels to italy frequently and I believe he uses Verizon, and has a special international program. His cell phone calls only cost .35 a minute if you call him, or he calls you (since its an am. cell phone, he gets charged for the calls made to him.) Cell phones are cheap enough to buy there, depending on what you're wanting to use it for, even if you don't travel there often, for 5.000pts you can get a phone with 5.000pts already on the prepaid card. Look for the special deals, one of the phone companies is always having one. Putting more money on the card is easy enough, you either go to a corte ingles, a store of the company itself, or buy a scratch off card from VIPs and can recharge it. Continente and any supermarket also sell the scratch off cards (you call the number on the card and then give them the code from the scratched part,and they put the amount of $$ that was on the card to your cell phone pre-paid card). Its very simple. If you do travel there often though, you need to make sure that if you're going to be gone for 9 months, that you still have some $$ on the card- or it will expire! If you have $$ on it, then after not using it for nine months it goes dormant, you can 'wake it up' by recharging your prepaid card (putting money on it) or for 3 more months, you'll be able to get calls, but won't be able to make them. If you don't do anything with it for a year, they cancel the number and you have to buy a totally new card and will get a new phone number. (thanks to Air Europa, I was left without any $$ on my card, and although 9 months hadn't passed, they only give you 3 months with no money on the card before canceling it! I had to but a new card and because I didn't need another phone, it wasn't a cheap fix! and I asked about the 9 month rule, and that was only if there is $$ on it! :o I have a transformer and plug adaptor at home to keep the battery from frizzing out also (had that happen to!- First trip without having recharged it for months it got its juice back, the second trip was too much and I had to buy a new phone!) Live and Learn!