How to Get Phone Service in Your New Home in Austria

If you have recently made the preparations to move abroad to Europe to live in Austria on a permanent basis you will probably want to have phone service in your new house or apartment so that you can contact family and friends in your home country. When you go to see about getting that phone line installed it may not be as simple of a process as you are expecting as you will have more options and alternatives than you are likely used to having in your home country when setting up phone service.

When you are ready to get your phone line installed in your new home you will need to contact Telekom Austria. Telekom Austria is the only telephone service provider in all of Austria for land lines. To submit an application for new service you have the option of filling out a request on their website or physically visiting a Telekom Austria shop to fill out the application paperwork.

You will be able to find Telekom Austria shops inside almost any post office in Austria. You may think that this is a strange place of a phone company to have a shop. Telekom Austria previously was a part of the post office, or the Osterreichische Post as it is called in German, and that is why most of the offices of Telekom Austria are located inside post offices in Austria.

In almost all cases the place you will be living will already have an analogue phone line installed. That means that all you will have to get Telekom Austria to do is to assign you a telephone number and release it for service on the line. Before you call to set up phone service though you should know what type of phone line that you want set up. They will ask if you want to have just the analogue line, VoIP, internet or IDSN.

Note that the base fee for ISDN service is higher than for the analogue line. The main advantage of the ISDN line is that you can get two lines with separate phone numbers. The disadvantage is that the ISDN line cannot carry the DSL signal. The analogue line, which is considerably cheaper, does carry the DSL signal.

There are also some other alternatives depending upon your needs. You can get phone service and internet access over a cable connection from the company Priority. Priority also offers a package that adds on a mobile phone from the provider One. The company Inode sells DSL service with a VoIP line as one of the cheapest options available.

If you also decide that you want to get a mobile phone, or cell phone, you should note that they are called 'handys' in Austria. The main providers that offer service are A1, One, Tele-ring, T-Mobile, 3 and Yesss.