Can you use iphone5 internationally during vacation?

I have verizon. I'm going on vacation in China, will I be able to use local SIM cards and use my iphone? I don't care about network access, just voice.

Verizon

Verizon gets a lot of kudos for its service in many places where AT&T is awful. Several of my friends here in Portland are using them and are quite pleased. Verizon also scored well compared to AT&T with the iPhone 4s when it comes to unlocking the SIM slot for international use on GSM networks and will do it for any customer whose account has been in good standing for 60 days. For the iPhone 5, the picture gets even better as Verizon is shipping their model with the SIM slot unlocked for any carrier, domestic or international.

If you use Verizon's SIM internationally-yes, Verizon's iPhone comes with a SIM card slot and a card in it-you'll be able to get online with a very straightforward rate structure: $25 for every 100MB block of data. You don't get any break for buying 800MB of data for a month like you do with AT&T and they don't provide roaming in as many countries as AT&T does, but it's a manageable enough pricing plan to use while in transit through a supported country or until you can pick up a local SIM to drop into your phone.

What are the caveats? On the LTE front, their iPhone 5 (model A1429) doesn't work with the LTE bands used in Canada, but does work on the LTE bands being deployed in Asia and Europe. How well this works out in practice remains to be seen. As well, if you buy an unsubsidized unlocked phone from Apple, you apparently can't activate it with Verizon or any other non-GSM provider according to Apple's fine print.

One other oddity that remains from earlier Verizon models is that you still can't access the data network while making a voice call, even with an LTE connection. Weird but true and further evidence that LTE isn't really a single standard, but is instead a grab bag of specifications that various carriers chose from to implement in their services.