Best International Cellphone Companies for England
Feb 28th, 2011, 10:01 PM
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Best International Cellphone Companies for England
I am currently researching international cellphones. I found a company called ezroam.com and they have rentals for 19 dollars a month and 79 to purchase. I found a lot of different companies and was wondering if anybody has bought from ezroam. Their rates are far and away better than my t-mobile rates. If anyone has any info or ideas about what are some good options I would love to know peoples opinions. Thanks for all the help!
Feb 28th, 2011, 10:19 PM
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If your intention is to use a mobile phone in the UK then the cheapest and easiest option is to buy a cheap PAYG phone in the UK - you shouldn't need to pay much more than £10 for the phone itself.
Mar 1st, 2011, 01:45 AM
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Alan is right and I would buy a Vodaphone PAYG - they seem to have the best coverage but do you have a decent phone in your home country. Just bring it and buy a UK SIM card.
I have an O2 iphone contract - the coverage outside cities is terrible.
I have an O2 iphone contract - the coverage outside cities is terrible.
Mar 1st, 2011, 03:37 AM
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We've done a lot of this over the last period of time but I'm not busy this morning. You can click onb my name, go back and find several of my replies.
1. Especially in England, you don't rent a phone. It's absurd in this day and age.
2. Since you are a T Mobile US customer, you already have a gsm phone, the kind they use in Europe. You may even have upgraded over the years and still have the old phones. What you need is an unlocked gsm phone with the 900 and 1800 mhz bands a so called auad band phone (4 bands, the two for the USA and the two for the rest of the civilized world). Even if you have an older T Mobile USA tri band, it will probably have both the European bands as well as the sole T Mobile USA band. If the phone is locked, call T Mobile USA and they will work with you to provide a code, for free, to unlock the phone. If you don't have such a phone, fret not because as Alan suggested, inexpensive unlocked gsm phones with the European frequencies are readilly available in England for a few quid.
2. You will then need a prepaid, pay as you go, provider in England. Their domestic rates are similar in the UK but if you're calling home, I would recommend T Mobile UK. Their coverage was not the best in the UK but they are currently merging with Orange UK and you can now use Orange UK towers while in the UK which has somewhat better coverage. Why T Mobile UK? They have a tie in with a compasny called yourcallworld. For international calling from the UK, nothing remotely compares with yourcallworld. For 3p/minute rounded to the nearest second, not raised to the next highest minute, you can call almost any landline in the world. Calls to mobile are more expensive but.....all calls to North America (USA and Canada) are considered landline calls because the USA and Canadian mobile systems require the recipeient of a call to pay his or her share while in Europe caller pays the whole tab.
English sim cards are easy as there are no language difficulties. They are also FREE...go into any mobile phone store such as Carphone Warehouse and/or Phones4u and you can get a sim card and all it will cost you is the initial top up which costs as little as 5 quid. Or you can go to the telcom's web sites (such as www.tmobile.co.uk or orange.co.uk) and you can have them post (mail) to your first hotel free sim cards. You will have to top them up before use but that's easy too. Just go into most any chemist (Boots, Superdrug), grocery (testco, sainsbury), conveneince (believe it or not 7-11), petro (gasoline) station. With the sim card you will usually get a credit card looking card which the merchant swipes through the terminal for the amount you want to top up (again 5 quid will do).
If you wnat to splurge, as you walkd down the street or in several of the train terminals, you will find people hawking sim cards from a company called Lebara. Again the sim card itself is free, and their rates are good. International calls with them are somewhat morer expensive than with yourcallworld...4p/minute (that's 33.3% more expensive but still a pretty good rate) but you don't have to call an auxillary number as with ycw...you directly dial so to call the USA you would dial 001 area code number (although on most mobile phones, you can dial +1 to stand in for 001). Their coverage is excellent as they use, I believe, O2 towers.
Vodafone UK as suggested above is fine also but you have to sign up for their international calling plan (easy to do) and calls to North America are 5p/minute....
And as I always end these posts with one of the nice things for Americans is that the two languages are very similar and there's a good chance the person selling you the sim card will be able to understand you and you him or her!
Dirt cheap and easy, eh.
1. Especially in England, you don't rent a phone. It's absurd in this day and age.
2. Since you are a T Mobile US customer, you already have a gsm phone, the kind they use in Europe. You may even have upgraded over the years and still have the old phones. What you need is an unlocked gsm phone with the 900 and 1800 mhz bands a so called auad band phone (4 bands, the two for the USA and the two for the rest of the civilized world). Even if you have an older T Mobile USA tri band, it will probably have both the European bands as well as the sole T Mobile USA band. If the phone is locked, call T Mobile USA and they will work with you to provide a code, for free, to unlock the phone. If you don't have such a phone, fret not because as Alan suggested, inexpensive unlocked gsm phones with the European frequencies are readilly available in England for a few quid.
2. You will then need a prepaid, pay as you go, provider in England. Their domestic rates are similar in the UK but if you're calling home, I would recommend T Mobile UK. Their coverage was not the best in the UK but they are currently merging with Orange UK and you can now use Orange UK towers while in the UK which has somewhat better coverage. Why T Mobile UK? They have a tie in with a compasny called yourcallworld. For international calling from the UK, nothing remotely compares with yourcallworld. For 3p/minute rounded to the nearest second, not raised to the next highest minute, you can call almost any landline in the world. Calls to mobile are more expensive but.....all calls to North America (USA and Canada) are considered landline calls because the USA and Canadian mobile systems require the recipeient of a call to pay his or her share while in Europe caller pays the whole tab.
English sim cards are easy as there are no language difficulties. They are also FREE...go into any mobile phone store such as Carphone Warehouse and/or Phones4u and you can get a sim card and all it will cost you is the initial top up which costs as little as 5 quid. Or you can go to the telcom's web sites (such as www.tmobile.co.uk or orange.co.uk) and you can have them post (mail) to your first hotel free sim cards. You will have to top them up before use but that's easy too. Just go into most any chemist (Boots, Superdrug), grocery (testco, sainsbury), conveneince (believe it or not 7-11), petro (gasoline) station. With the sim card you will usually get a credit card looking card which the merchant swipes through the terminal for the amount you want to top up (again 5 quid will do).
If you wnat to splurge, as you walkd down the street or in several of the train terminals, you will find people hawking sim cards from a company called Lebara. Again the sim card itself is free, and their rates are good. International calls with them are somewhat morer expensive than with yourcallworld...4p/minute (that's 33.3% more expensive but still a pretty good rate) but you don't have to call an auxillary number as with ycw...you directly dial so to call the USA you would dial 001 area code number (although on most mobile phones, you can dial +1 to stand in for 001). Their coverage is excellent as they use, I believe, O2 towers.
Vodafone UK as suggested above is fine also but you have to sign up for their international calling plan (easy to do) and calls to North America are 5p/minute....
And as I always end these posts with one of the nice things for Americans is that the two languages are very similar and there's a good chance the person selling you the sim card will be able to understand you and you him or her!
Dirt cheap and easy, eh.
Mar 1st, 2011, 03:53 AM
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Just to add a few more details to the above...while in the UK\, calls you receive on your mobile sim will be free but your callers will pay a surcharge so when people look at the rates to call the UK from the USA, don't look at the ad that says 3¢/minute (always in the USA raised to the next highst minute) but the fine print will talk about a surcharge of 20 ore more cents a minute to call a UK mobile (that's why it's free to receive).
What I like to do is I found a company called localphone. They can provide you a phone number in almost any area code in the USA, Canada, England and just about everywhere else in the world (I was even able to get a NYC 212 number which is in short supply..no 718 for me)....The number costs me $3 to acquire and 99¢/month to maintain. I can then set via the web a ring to number which canb be my English sim card. The forwarding rate is 16¢/minute and then I set both my home number and US mobile numbers to ring to the local phone 212 number so people calling me while I'm away have the call forwarded. You may noty like that but it's available so you cdan forward calls to your USA mobile via this way at 16¢/minute.
Finally almost all the En glish telcoms follow the eu roaming rates wo shen you leave the UK for a weekend jaunt in Paris, uou can use the English sim card. No receive calls are not free, you now pay 14p/minute to receive calls and you don't have the dirt cheap calls to the USA but you have fairly cheap calls within the eu. Or you can buy a local sim card if you're using an unlocked phone and just swap the sim cards.
All sorts of neat things, far better than paying the asinine T Mobile US roaming rates which are especially a joke when you consider that if you roam on T Mobile UK with a T Mobile USA sim card, their justification for the $1.29/minute to make and receive calls is they have to reimburse the other carrier. Sure T Mobile USA reimburses T Mobile UK. You know what that means, don't you. It means they take the money from their left pocket and put it in their right pocket. But tere are plenty of suckers around who think they're getting a bargain.
What I like to do is I found a company called localphone. They can provide you a phone number in almost any area code in the USA, Canada, England and just about everywhere else in the world (I was even able to get a NYC 212 number which is in short supply..no 718 for me)....The number costs me $3 to acquire and 99¢/month to maintain. I can then set via the web a ring to number which canb be my English sim card. The forwarding rate is 16¢/minute and then I set both my home number and US mobile numbers to ring to the local phone 212 number so people calling me while I'm away have the call forwarded. You may noty like that but it's available so you cdan forward calls to your USA mobile via this way at 16¢/minute.
Finally almost all the En glish telcoms follow the eu roaming rates wo shen you leave the UK for a weekend jaunt in Paris, uou can use the English sim card. No receive calls are not free, you now pay 14p/minute to receive calls and you don't have the dirt cheap calls to the USA but you have fairly cheap calls within the eu. Or you can buy a local sim card if you're using an unlocked phone and just swap the sim cards.
All sorts of neat things, far better than paying the asinine T Mobile US roaming rates which are especially a joke when you consider that if you roam on T Mobile UK with a T Mobile USA sim card, their justification for the $1.29/minute to make and receive calls is they have to reimburse the other carrier. Sure T Mobile USA reimburses T Mobile UK. You know what that means, don't you. It means they take the money from their left pocket and put it in their right pocket. But tere are plenty of suckers around who think they're getting a bargain.
Mar 1st, 2011, 04:19 AM
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www.mobal.com always the easy cost effective solution for me.
Mar 1st, 2011, 04:23 AM
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Yeah...mobal is so good......national calls within the UK $1.25/minute compared to 20p/minute. Calls to the USA, $1.50/minute compared to 3p/minute. You really think that's an effective solution. To each his or her own.
Mar 1st, 2011, 06:58 AM
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In my opinion WorldSIM (www.worldsim.com) is the best solution, with the same sim card you will have a US and a UK number and you have free roaming for incoming calls in more than 90 countries. As a customer I also know that they will have a new bundle with a phone included for a small price, hopefully they will release it soon because it's something that I'm also interested.
I've tried another two international sim cards to save on roaming but this one is to keep because until now is the best I know.
Hope it helps.
I've tried another two international sim cards to save on roaming but this one is to keep because until now is the best I know.
Hope it helps.
Mar 1st, 2011, 09:36 PM
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Thanks for all the advice, and info. I have decided to go with ezroam.com because they have quadband phones, which work in 170 countries and the rental is 19 dollars. I may even buy one for some of my other trips I have planned. Anyway thanks so much you guys have been a great help, hopefully I made the right purchase. Now does anybody have any ideas for inexpensive hotels in London close to attractions, and any neat pubs?
Mar 4th, 2011, 05:20 PM
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Wow! You actually decided to rent at a much more expensive rate. You can even get a cheap unlocked phone for $20. Good luck!
I am surprised that someone actually recommended mobal. I have not seen any sim that's as expensive as mobal, especially to call the USA. Heck! It's even more expensive than roaming on your AT&T/Tmobile sim. Somebody please explain to me how mobal can be "cost effective"
I am surprised that someone actually recommended mobal. I have not seen any sim that's as expensive as mobal, especially to call the USA. Heck! It's even more expensive than roaming on your AT&T/Tmobile sim. Somebody please explain to me how mobal can be "cost effective"
Mar 19th, 2011, 09:00 PM
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Hey guys xyz123 thanks for the info that sounds like a pretty good deal. I rented ezroam b/c I am stopping in Italy for a few days before going back to the states and it is pretty cheap their as well. If I was just going to the UK that would be ideal thanks again.
