Buy SIM card at CDG?
 

Does anyone know if a Mobicarte prepaid SIM card can be easily found at Charles DeGaulle airport?

I have an unlocked tri-band GSM cellular phone, and intend to buy a pre-paid SIM card for my next trip to France, in September. Browsing the web and Fodor's, I gather that a Mobicarte SIM card will cost me 30 euros in France (around $36). Buying it in advance on the web, 220-electronics has it for $50 plus shipping. So for a bit extra, I can have the convenience of having my phone number in advance, and being able to use the phone as soon as I get off the plane. But if I can very easily buy the SIM card in the airport, perhaps it isn't worth buying it in advance.

Any other recommendations, Fodorites? Do people prefer Vodafone, or some other carrier, to Mobicarte? We had good coverage and service from Vodafone in Spain, but the SIM cards being sold on the web for France seem to emphasize Mobicarte.

- Larry

Larry,
I will be going to France in a couple of weeks (17 days, but who's counting?) and I'm planning to buy a SIM card soon after arrival, so I'll check out CDG and let you know.

Thanks, Marcy. Bon voyage, and I look forward to hearing about your trip when you return.

- Larry

Question for Marcy- did you find that you were able to buy a SIM card at CDG?

Thanks,

-Larry

I just had that same issue with my phone and I opted for the $50 card for just the reason you stated.

I had a choice of 2 diffrent service providers; SFR and Mobicart. The coverage map for SFR looked like it was a little better in the hills of Provence, so I chose that one.

BUT...now I find in reading the directions that the phone number is not assigned until you activate the service, which you cannot do until you arrive in France. "First, go to France" it reads. Then you dial a number, enter the code, and the "operatrice" will tell you your phone number. In French.

So, Larry to answer your question, go for the Mobicarte. You get the number with the card.

We would like to take our cell phone to europe with us. Our service is Cingular
and the phones are Nokia 3595 with SIM cards in them. What will I need to do to use tem over there? Thank You.

I'm assuming you are asking if you can easily find a SIM card at CDG just after landing?
If that's the question, I'm pretty confident the answer is no. The only commercial enterprises I've ever seen at CDG are car rental companies, airline companies, and cafés. Maybe if you could get into the duty free area there would be something, but I've scoured those duty free shops dozens of times and never seen anything like a place you could buy a SIM card.
I'm guessing you'll have to wait until you get into Paris, or wherever you're headed, and go to an Orange store or maybe a FNAC or something similar.

If you use any U.S. service you'll pay roaming charges.

But that's probably beside the point because I think your GSM phone has the wrong bands. You'll need 900/1800 in most countries in Europe. If I'm not mistaken, the 3595 uses 850/1900 which is pretty much limited to the U.S.

This is a good article on the subject:
http://www.thetravelinsider.info/2002/0308.htm

Hi Bigboy - If you type xyz123 in the search box, you will find ton of info about GSM phone. Also, you need to find out whether your cellular phone is a GSM one or not.

Nokia 3595 - from T-Mobile product detail: Single Band (1900MHz)
Also, if you select it and a Motorola and a Sony Ericsson, the last two are 'international phone' and the Nokia is not.

If you want a 'world phone' to use as your regular cell, you can switch to T-Mobile. I have a Sony Ericsson and the $29.99/month plan for home, but can make/receive calls in Europe for $0.99/minute. Not a good plan for chatty people, but simple/reasonable for quick calls or emergencies. Your phone number is the same, anyone can call you there that can call you back home.
Otherwise, you need a different GSM phone (unlocked) and a SIM card for each country you visit, I believe.

Linda, thanks for your help. Your information about having to get to France before you can activate the SFR card was new to me. That's very interesting, since one of the main reasons to spend extra money to get a card before leaving is to know what your phone number will be. But my wife has now looked at the telestial site for French SIM cards:

(http://www.telestial.com/products/france_sim.htm)

It says that the same is true for Mobicarte: you need to be in France to activate the card and get your number.

Could I bother you for one more detail? You said that when you activate the phone, the number is read to you in French. I assume this is by an automated voice. Do you recall HOW it is read to you? Is it digit by digit? or the usual way the French read phone numbers, in pairs of digits? If you miss it the first time, do you get another chance?

The reason I ask: I speak and understand French pretty well, yet one of the most difficult things to understand in French is phone numbers.

A typical cell phone number might be (0)6 83 94 97 81 (don't dial that, folks, I just made it up). If they read it one digit at a time, I'll get it with no trouble ("zero, six, huit, trois, neuf, ..."). But that number would normally be read "six, eighty-three, ninety-four, ninety-seven, eighty-one", and in French, that's a killer: "zero six, quatre-vingt-trois, quatre-vingt-quatorze, quatre-vingt-dix-sept, quatre-vingt et onze".

People read these at high speed, and it drives me nuts. The problem is mostly the eighties and the nineties, which are, respectively, "four-twenty" and "four-twenty-ten". So you hear "quatre" and write "4", then the "vingt" comes along, and you cross it out and write "8" (for 80), and then comes the "quatorze" for fourteen, and you cross out the "8" and write "94". My chance of getting it right the first time is nil.

By the way, my GSM phone is a Motorola Timeport triband: 900/1800/1900. I don't use it in the US. Here (near Boston) I use Verizon, which has far and away the best coverage in my area. But I've already used the phone once in Spain, and my daughter just borrowed it and used it in Hungary and Poland. So this trip to France will be our third use of the phone within a year. It's not the newest or smallest phone around, but it's rugged and reliable.

We did try to buy a SIM card WITH A NUMBER on eBay. It was a Carte Orange, and had a number because it had already been activated and used in France. But believe it or not, the US Post Office seems to have actually lost the Priority Mail package, a first in my experience. It's been a week now, and the seller has just refunded my money, and is putting in a claim with the Post Office.

If I can't get a card with a number and a small number of minutes on it, I'll probably just wait until we get to Lyon. That means we won't be able to make calls on the train from CDG to Lyon, no big deal. Perhaps I can have a native speaker help me activate the phone - just the listening to the number part.

We've loved having a phone in Europe. Knowing that our kids can reach us at any time if there's a problem at home gives us great peace of mind. We also use it to dial for restaurant reservations, and for calls home, without having to worry about hotel surcharges. And we've used it from the car for directions.

- Larry

Larry,
As StCirq said, I didn't find any place at CDG to buy a SIM card, and I looked all over.

I ended up buying mine at a phone store in Paris.

One surprise that you might want to know about is that you can't make international calls for about 24 hours after activating the phone. Nobody was able to give me a good reason for this.

Larry:

I don't have any personal experience with listening to someone read a French cell phone number, as I bought my cell phone in France and the Orange people just gave me a number, but I have never, ever, in many years, heard a French person read a number digit by digit. It's always either in two-digit pairs or sometimes 3- or 4-digit pairs if the number is something easy like 100 or 2000. You may have to brush up on French numbers or ask someone to help you. It's true- numbers are always one of the hardest things to learn to translate quickly in any language. Good luck!

Thanks, all, for the replies. Thanks Marcy, and I hope you had a great trip.

StCirq, I also have only heard the French read phone numbers in groups, but I wonder what the automated recordings do. Perhaps I'll find out soon.

I did have an idea on writing down numbers, though. My only problem is with the eighties and the nineties - they throw me off just enough to miss the next group. My idea is to write some symbol, such as "x", for the "quatre-vingt". Thus as I hear 06 83 94 97 81 being read, I'd write "06 x3 x14 x17 x1", and then sort out the eighties and nineties later. Maybe I'll get to try this.

As a young child, I sent away for a Captain Midnight decoder ring, to decode messages given at the end of each radio show in a simple-substitution cipher using two-digit codes. But having just learned to write, I found that I couldn't write the numeral "5" fast enough to keep up (I could do all the others). Strangely, it never dawned on me to write some other, simpler symbol for the five. And when I got my mother to take down the codes for me, that simple idea never occurred to her either. And I later attended MIT.

- Larry

Larry:

Given the story you've recounted, you'll be able to deal with the French numbers. Use your code, whatever it is.

Soixante-dix and up - give a code A
Quatre-vingt and up - give a code B

Should work. Bonne chance!

" Do you recall HOW it is read to you? Is it digit by digit?"

Larry,
I haven't used it yet and I had the same question. So I asked a friend of mine (who is French) and she said they would probably use the double digit form. And that it would most likely be a female voice if that helps.

The instruction booklet that came with the SIM card is also in French. I too speak some French but share your phobia about numbers & fast speaking. So I just left my friend's house and gave her the booklet to read so she could just hit me with the highlights later. I'll post back if there's anything relevant to report. I was surprised that there was a booklet....thought it was pretty universal, but this is pretty long.

Again, like you (are we twins separated at birth???!) I purchased the exact same phone that you did. I'm glad to hear it worked well for you. Any quirks I need to know about before I leave.?

We're leaving on Sept 1.

Linda431, I do have some tips:

But first, it might help you and others if I clarify who the various companies are in France, and what their products are:

Company (subsidiary of) [product]
---------------------------------
SFR (Vodafone) [La Carte]
Orange (France Télécom) [Mobicarte]
Bouygues Télécom [Carte Nomad]

The "Carte Orange" is also from Orange. It differs slightly from Mobicarte. It's a bit confusing that the "Carte Orange" and "La Carte" are from different companies.

First SFR tip: you can find instructions for the SFR SIM card in English on the web. Here's one URL:

http://www.cellularabroad.com/franceSIMop.html

Here's the actual SFR site, English version (it's available in six languages):

http://www.sfr.com/COM/en/index.jsp

One of their sub-pages says, "For any information on connection, call our customer care on 06 1000 4357* (+33 6 1000 4357 from abroad). A multilingual operator will answer all your questions."

Tip number 2: I had a Vodafone SIM card when I used this phone in Spain last November. At some point, I called them with a question, and was connected with an English-speaking operator (I do speak Spanish, but not as well as French). Along the way, I discovered that it was possible to have most of the voice prompts from the system changed to English! All I had to do was ask, and it was done. That made using the phone a bit easier. So you might try giving them a call in France and see if they can do the same thing as Vodafone in Spain.

I also was able to change most of the screen prompts on the telephone into English. See the first of the URLs I gave above for instructions on how to do that - scroll down to "Language Selection". Despite that, the phone still displayed "Buenos Dias" each time I turned it on.

- Larry

We landed in CDG two weeks ago and found a place that sells SIM from SFR. We came in on American Airline and after we exited to the public area, we turned right, went passed the airport information center and next to it, there is a booth that sells magazines/postcards/tabac and SIM cards. It has pictures of different cell phones hanging above its cash register.

The starter package was 20 euros but when my husband put the SFR SIM into his unlocked Sony multi-band GSM phone, it didn't work (no signal). My husband thinks it's because of the frequency of his phone and not the card. Fortunately, we tried this in front of the store clerk so we were able to just walk away without paying.

So yes, you can get SIM at CDG but test it before you pay.

As a side note, we found a pay phone which takes credit card and called our apartment rental agent. The couple minutes call cost 4.50 euros but it was still cheaper than the 14 euros "regular" phone card that the tabac store offered since we only needed to make that one phone call.

According to this public phone's instruction, looks like one can also make toll-free calls which maybe useful for visitors with pre-arranged shuttle service.

Bless you Larry! Me, the goggle queen as my husband calls me, I never even thought of that.
Checking it out as we speak.

One thing I find very frustrating about seeking information through Google is that you get contradictory advice. I'm hoping Fodorites can set me on the right track!

Several sites (usually selling/referring for U.S. companies that sell products/cards to travellers) say "beware, it's not simple to just walk into a phone store to buy a SIM card if you're a non-resident, so buy from us in advance blah blah blah", whereas other sites say you can. Can an American or Canadian who has travelled to Paris and bought a SIM card for their unlocked GSM phone tell me if it is a simple procedure? I am looking to buy a SFR SIM card ideally right at the airport. I suspect I could go to a "Tabac" or newsstand. Thanks very much!