One of our family friends has a son taking 10 months of school in Italy for his masters.
Prior to leaving, they bought him a 8830 with International Plan.
Since arriving in Italy, they have had nothing but problems, startin wit no phone service.
Has anyone used the international VZW plan? Any success?

imo get the phone unlocked and get a prepaid local card he can put cash on, it would be cheaper then 1.99 min using verzion roaming partner, also does the phone have a sim card in it? it needs a sim that the phone does not come with at time of sale.

I haven't used Verizon, but I can tell you that if the international capabilities have been activated, it is sometimes necessary to go in and manually specify GSM network and search for the available networks. Once recognized on the network it will stay active.

Rome, Milan, Bergamo, Catania, Brescia, Napoli, Venezia, Palermo, Bologna. All worked flawlessly with my 8830. Since you said there is no phone (this is the GSM level which is necessary before it hooks into GPRS) there is something wrong with the set up. Sounds like they may not have international service. Would not unlock. Would contact Verizon Global support at 1800 922 0204 or outside US 1 908 559 4899.

I remember seeing something in the manual about having to manually tell the phone which network to use when you are outside of the US if it doesn't auto-detect.

Under Options, go into Mobile Network. Under Network Mode, change from "1XEV" to "GSM", that should take care of the problem.

Verizon has a nasty habit of forgetting to enable the international piece of the plan. They are new to this whole "world" idea. We have had several people travel outside of North America and not have service. And Verizon is ALWAYS supposed to enable International Dialing for all 8830 lines.

On set up of 8830 it asks if you want the CDMA / GSM automatically set up. I had no problem with this in Europe. Most likely you were not set up on international plan.