I recently went to singapore, hong kong and Sri Lanka on a vacation using my rogers V551. Unless your going to europe 1800 is quite useless in my experience as most of the world relies on the 900 mghz freqeuncy, so getting a quadband phone is very useful. I loved using the phone number that i had with rogers as my friends could still contact me and i could call outbound. Only problem is with Rogers roaming it costs an arma nd a leg. In sri Lanka i wazs paying $5.99/minute of airtime locally and $6.99 for a call to canada. Fido is slightly cheaper but essentially roam of the same partners. Its usually better to manually search for the best provider as Rogers/fido offers roaming with many providers, In Hong Kong I found that Peoples and CSL were by far the best in terms of reception, in Singapore M1 and in Sri Lanka Dialog GSM.
With rogers roaming you MUST have all your bills paid and have a good history with them otherwise it wont work, i suggest calling them up before you go. With fido they perform a credit check on you.
If you dont want to pay a lot for roaming i suggest unlocking your fone and putign a prepaid SIM card froma local provider such as CSL in hong Kong, the rates are quite cheap and in places like sri lanka for 200 local minutes u can spend $7.50 on dialog! My bill before i decided to use a local provider was nearly 275$ so i suggest the unlocking option
