Mobile Phone SIM Cards

[Taff]

I am going to Normandy in a couple of weeks and the better half has a contract phone. I have her old one on PAYG. It is 75ppm to call home on the contract phone . Would it be cheaper if I purchased a French SIM card to call/text home?

 

[KeithJ]

Hi Taff

I think you'll find it's about half that to phone home (38p/min) and 14p/min to receive a call, as the charges are regulated and they are not allowed to charge more. The 75p you mentioned is probably Vodafone Passport, where you pay a one off charge of 75p to phone home or receive a call, then for phoning home you use your standard minutes.

We spend very little on phone calls these days because we usually use the site's wifi on our laptop and communicate with Skype. In most of Europe wifi is widespread and cheap or free, although in France, like England it is less widespread and can be expensive.

 

[Woody3]

Wi-fi is widely available in France for free at every McDonalds (where there is often mains available inside) and Pat a Pain. Unlike in the UK, at McD's in France you don't need to register to use the 'service,' just click on agree and away you go. Many municipal sites also provide site-wide wi-fi which is free (if the site is expensive) or quite cheap - at Chinon it is €1/day or €5/week for unlimited (and fast) use.
Rather than use Skype which has been having problems across Europe lately (and which can often be blocked and may get much worse now they are owned by Micro$oft) open a VoIP account in the UK (I use voip.co.uk) and download a softfone onto your laptop (Phonerlite is very good.) Then once on line, open the softfone, see it register, and call home. (You can get USB handsets for less than a tenner which make life very easy if you don't want to use internal speaker/mic.) I pay 1p/min to call a UK landline, the speech quality is very good albeit sometimes with delay, and your CLI is a UK number (as it is for someone to call you.)

You don't want a French SIM. They cost about €15 plus €10 minimum loading, the system only recognises putting more money on the card as 'usage,' and if you don't make calls it for a particular period - usually 8 weeks - the card ceases and you loose any credit. Most of them you cannot add credit outside France as they use shortform numbers for the purpose.

 

[Tony_5041742]

75ppm is a very expensive rate, agree with comments about voice over IP, but a simple alternative could be to go for a less expensive PAYG tarriff from a UK provider. We've got a couple of mobiles on Asda mobile, which is based on the Vodafone network, and we pay 30ppm for overseas calls. But this is a very fast changing market so if I was looking again I'd use one of the tariff comparison websites like moneysavingexpert to check current rates.

 

[KeithJ]

As I said - 75p is a one off charge for the Vodafone Passport service (no network is allowed to charge 75p per minute).
So if, for instance, you make a 10 minute call home you pay 75p once, then use your standard minutes, which most contracts include plenty of these days and you would not otherwise be using if you were out of the country.

 

[Taff]

Thank you all for your advice.