Keep your Smart number active while abroad

Smart's page is the most generous of the three Philippine networks, and it is generous in a specific way: it does not simply allow a dormant line to survive, it states that the line keeps receiving while it waits.

The window

Smart's help page puts the account rule in one paragraph: "When your account balance reaches zero (0), you are given 180 days to reload to keep your account active. During this period, you can continue receiving incoming calls and text messages and make outgoing collect calls and calls to toll-free numbers. However, failure to reload within 180 days will lead to disconnection of your prepaid account. To continue enjoying the Smart prepaid service, you must purchase another prepaid SIM."

Read the middle sentence twice, because it is unusual. Most carriers describe what stops working when the balance is gone. Smart describes what keeps working: incoming calls, incoming text messages, collect calls and calls to toll-free numbers. A number in this state still receives, which for a reader of this site means a bank code can still land.

The last sentence is the cliff. A reload inside the window restores the account; a reload after it does not, because the account is gone and what is left to buy is a SIM.

The load has its own expiry

The same page separates two things that are easy to run together, the account and the credit sitting in it, and states the load's own deadline: "The value of the Smart Prepaid, TNT, and Smart Bro Prepaid call & text cards must be used up within 365 days (1 year) from the date it was loaded into your account."

That is the one-year figure the 2017 joint circular asked for, implemented by Smart in its own words, and it explains a rule readers meet in practice: a reload does not sit in the account forever. It buys time for your balance to be there, not a permanent balance.

The page also says a card "must be loaded into your account before the stated expiry date printed on the back of the card", and that "the card will be considered invalid upon reaching the expiry date". An unused load card bought in Manila and carried abroad has a deadline of its own, printed on the card rather than published online.

One page, three brands

The quotations above are not Smart's alone. The page names Smart Prepaid, TNT and Smart Bro Prepaid together and applies the same account rule to all three. The Philippines is a market of sub-brands, and this is the one place we could read where a single carrier states plainly that the smaller brands inherit the parent's clock.

What the page does not say

Whether a received text counts as activity is not addressed here. The page describes incoming messages as something that still arrives during the zero-balance window; it does not say a message extends the window, and it says the reload is what ends it. If the number is holding an account you cannot lose, that distinction is worth money: reload rather than rely on traffic in the other direction.

Roaming is not addressed either. Whether roaming has to be enabled for a message to reach a Smart SIM abroad is not stated on the page we read, and we are not going to answer it on Smart's behalf.

For comparison, Globe's contract puts incoming texts outside the definition of activity altogether, and DITO allows 90 days rather than 180. The three are set side by side on the Philippines page.

Before you fly

• Count a hundred and eighty days from the day the balance hits zero, and put a reload before it.
• A reload resets the window and starts a 365-day clock on the load itself.
• If nothing else is possible, note that the number keeps receiving while the window runs, and that this is a reason to reload rather than a substitute for it.