Buy the cell phone overseas?
 

In view of possible British Airways strikes, DH and I are thinking we could use a phone on this trip. How about just buying a phone in France? Does that make more sense (and cents) than to get our current cell unlocked and getting sim card? Also, would we need to get a different sim card in London?
Thanks to all.

I did search this subject but couldn't find the post that discussed this subject. Anyone?

No single answer. I'll give you some hints to your decision.
1 - frequencies. US uses the 850 and 1900 MHz, while the world uses 900 and 1800 MHz frequency plans. If your cell phone is not enabled to the 900 and/or 1800 MHz (hopefuly both), you may forget using it in Europe.
2 - to buy or not buy. It's possible to find cheap (30 to 40 euros) phones, usualy in all brands shops, supermarkets and places alike. Make sure they are not locked to a specific operator.
3 - one or multiple SIMs. Depends on the usage (minutes) you plan to use.
3.1 - (dis)advantages of one SIM/several countries:
- you may check carefuly if the SIM is roaming enabled, otherwise it will be dead after crossing the border.
- cheap calls and short messages within SIM's home country but expensive while roaming.
- income calls are not free when the SIM is outside it's home country
- consultation of voice mail has absurd values (typicaly 3x the cost of an international call)
- you don't need to physicaly change SIMs when crossing the border
- one single telephone number to be contacted
- it might be more difficult to add air minutes when the SIM is outside home country (when buying the SIM at 1st time, check the ways of loading the SIM with air time minutes, and the feasibility of doing that in a 3rd country).
3.2 - (dis)advantages of one SIM per country:
- cheap calls and short messages within SIM's home country
- income calls always free of charge
- you need to physicaly change SIMs when crossing the border
- different telephone numbers to be contacted
- in some countries the SIM can be loaded in post offices and newspapers kyosks.

Very important notes: My notes are about the + and the - of arriving to a country and buying a phone and a SIM locally. I know there are different schemas using call back companies, where you have a Luxembourg or Estonian SIM and dial a specific number, and wait to be contacted. I am not familar with these services but I guess there may be cost effective options. To use these, you must subscribe the service in advance in order to receive the SIM by slow mail.

The unlocking of your phone should'nt be a big hasle - We get our Service Provider to unlock our phones the moment we purchased them and prefer using our own phones when overseas as we are familiar with the ins & outs of our own phones.

Upon arrival at Heathrow we purchase a new Simcard for Britain and when we get to Paris do the same. Takes literally 10minutes.
Best of luck on whatever you decide.

PS: Keep the simcards - sometimes they can re-instate the number.

First thing...check to see if your phone (as a starting point should be GSM) works overseas. There is convenience in having a phone with you for local calls. If your phone can do it...why not? This would be the cheapest solution IMHO

I took my phone (first time) with me to Turkey, and it was a lifesaver to have it. Bought sim card while there and re-filled it a couple of times.

Sim cards in the UK are very cheap - you can get them in pound shops.

Mobile phones arn't expensive (in the UK) - you can get a basic LG mobile for £15 that includes £10 calling. It will be tied to a single network, and will not work in the US, but at that price it is virtually disposable.

I'll take it a step further...you can get sim cards in the UK for free. If you go to the web sites of the big 4, vodafone uk, o2 uk, orange uk and t mobile uk, I believe all will post to anyu UK address free sim cfards. Also last year when I got off the train at St. Pancreas from Paris, hawkers were waiting to sell me a liberra (sp.) sim cfard for free but I had to buy £5 worth of cdredit...also as I was walking down Oxford Street and passed a T Mobile UKI store, they were handing out free sim cards.

Are you taking a computer? If so, look into Skype.com. Talking computer to computer is free, phone talking on Skype is maybe 2 cents per minute. There are lots of cyber cafes in Europe, which makes communications back home easier. If you really want a cell phone, get one on ebay before you leave, making sure it is at least an unlocked tri-ban. As stated above, simcards are really cheap. One problem I did have was when I purchased a simcard in UK, and I could not recharge it in France. I had to buy a French card. THEN, the cards instructions were in French, which I do not read well. I had to stop 4 girls on the street to change the language to English so I could use it. We both had a good laugh.

Thanks so much-this is exactly the info I'm needing but have one perhaps silly question below.

I think unlocking our phone might make the most sense as we might have to call the driver in London from our hotel in Lyon if our flight is going to be late.

We will fly to France via London. If there is time to buy the phone at Heathrow, will it work in Lyon if we have to call our London driver? If I understand above, we'd have to buy a new sim card in France and expect the call to London to be expensive?

Am just re-reading Lobo and maybe we don't need a new sim card in France?

I am fairly certain that when I have bought a "Pay as you go" mobile in the UK, I have had to arrange some form of registration before I could use it in Italy (I am presuming any overseas destination). The registration could be done online.

Thanks, willit. We shall see then.

I like the CallinEurope.com solution. For 60 bucks before you leave home you have a cell phone in hand that will work from pretty well anywhere in Europe. You know your number before you go so you can leave it with friends/relatives.

The phone, instructions and helpful US based customer service are all in English so no worries figuring out a new phone.

The rates are less expensive than most pay as you go phones you can buy in Europe and likely way less than international roaming with an American phone.

For me, the best part is the calls are billed straight to my credit card. So no sims to change from one country to another and no running out of talk time when you're in the midst of a call.

My phone has worked perfectly on 2 trips to France and one to Greece. Check them out.

Rob

Unless it has changed recently, the only UK provider that requires registration to activate itsd sim card is Orange UK...it can be done online. I suspect you have to enter a UK address but you can use the address of your hotel. All the others, work out of the box (provided there is credit. Some give you the sim card for free but then you have to buy credit, as little as 5 quid).

As part of the worldwide war on terror, to coin a phrase, some countries have introduced a requirement that sim cards bought in that country be registered and require a passport. This is about as effective as the screening that was done at the Amsterdam airport at CVhristmas time but that's another story. Such a proposal was made in the UK about a year and a half ago but it was stillborn. In most countries, you can still buy prepaid sim cards no questions asked, insert them in the unlocked gsm phone and voila you're in business. Whether that's a good thing or not I'll leave to others to discuss.

On the other hand, we could ask our hotel to make the call and charge it to our room....

xyz123 To Clarify, I am sure one has to register a UK PAYG phone in order to use it overseas. I could be wrong, but I needed to for both my Virgin Mobile and Vodaphone accounts.

willit....

They hyanded me a T Mobile UK sim card as I walked down Oxford Street...I put 5 quid on it....I used it several times...I am home right now and turned it on....it registered on a US carrier and just for fun I sent myself a text message from my US phone and it was received promptly. I did not register it. No registration is necessary for the vast majority of UK sim cards...as noted only Orange UK requires registration to activate the account. The rest of them. pop the card in the phone and you're in (last year during the charge free roaming summer vodafone UK had, I had several vodafone UK sim cards posted to my hotel....they came with £1 of credit...I popped them in the phone and they worked (that is I was able to receive)...I will stick to my guns on this one...UK sim cards, for th emost part, do not require any registration for use whether in the UK or while roaming.

tod posted:

"The unlocking of your phone should'nt be a big hasle - We get our Service Provider to unlock our phones the moment we purchased them and prefer using our own phones when overseas as we are familiar with the ins & outs of our own phones."

This sounds perfect! We are getting ready to go to Europe and I need a new phone so this sounds like the perfect solution. Went into my service provider (Verizon) to get the new phone and asked them about this and they said it was not possible.

So I said fine, I will buy an unlocked phone online and then I can use my sim in it when I am in the states. I was told that their sims will only work with their equipment.

Am I getting a line from them or do I just have the wrong provider?

Here's the deal I think....

The 2g phones of Europe almost invariably use a system called gsm...I don't remember what the initials stand for but the basic idea of gsm system phones is the heart of the phone is a little removable chip called a sim card (I do remember what sim stands for, subscriber information module)....the sim card determines the home company, the phone number, carries some other information, stores some phone numbers. Change the sim card and voila you can change a phone with a British phone number to a phone with a German phone number and then switch the cards back. Europeans, with small national borders in the 1990's thought this was the way to go.

GSM, however, never really caught on in the USA. Verizon used a different technology and its phone do not work in Europe and other places where gsm in the previaling technology. Verizon has some dual technology phones which they rent out in lieu of what gsm carriers can do if somebody wants to use the phone say in Europe but that does not change the fact Verizon does not use sim cards or gsm for its phones in the USA. Both T Mobile and AT&T are gsm carriers and their phones will work overseas and they use sim cards but then another issue becomes frequencies. Most gsm phones sold today will have b oth of the home frequencies and at least one but more and more both of the other frequencies, hence the name quad band.

So your old verizon phone is probably, unless it's one of those dual technology phones, useless in Europe and the issue of locked or unlocked is moot. However, quad band phones are readilly available on ebay. Check to see they are unlocked (almost invariablyh they are) and check the frequencies. Some older phones were called tri bands and might have says the 2 USA frequencies 850 and 1900) and only one European/rest of the world frequency (usually 1800 but sometimes 900). It will work usually in the big cities but there may be some places in various European countries that use one but not the other. OTOH tri bands origbinally manufactured for world markets as opposed to North America will have both 900 and 1800 and only one North American frequency (1900). Tri bands are usually much older phones. To save even more money, you can find some dual band phones but make sure they're dual band with 900/1800 not 850/1900. Depends what you want to spend. Want an MP3 player, a camera, they're surprisingly affordable and their technology is getting better all the time. I use my phone all the time with its MP3 player. Put a memory card in it and I can store literally thousands of songs, store thousands of videos and whatever. The more you want to spend, the more advanced this technology will become (not suggesting to have phone take the place of a digital camera but I do get surprisingly good pictures from the camera on my phone).

In any event, this is all passing technology although I don't thinbk 2g (2nd generation) gsm phones will become totally obsolete in the near future. But with the advent of smart phones, i phones (which is a type of smnart phone) and whatever, we are already into 4g (4th generation technology) but for a basic phone, you'll be fine with the cheapest gsm phone to meet your needs for the foreseeable future.

Excellent xyz123!

If we pass a cheap phone in London, will consider buying it, otherwise, I'm going to ask the hotel to call our ride for me and let Orbitz send an email if flight stuff changes.

There is absolutely no need to register UK payg sims in order to use them overseas. They roam out of the box. Both my Virgin and Tmobile UK sims were bought on ebay UK. I put my sim in the Virgin one and it started working (even with data roaming active). Same thing with tmobile. Friend just did the same thing (bought tmobile UK on ebay.uk) a couple of weeks ago before heading to London.

It was mentioned above that CallInEurope will be cheaper to call the US with. I know for a fact that it’s impossible for that to be the case. You can call the US with tmobile for about 4p/min or so. Virgin I believe is 20p. CIE cannot come close to that.

When I'm out on trips, I just buy a cellphone from that certain country I am visiting because usually, it is cheaper than using your own phone which is more likely locked for use in your own country/by your own provider. Or you could try buying unlocked phones over the web. Just a suggestion to everyone, being the Facebook-crazy person that I am, I added two helpful resources about cellphones on Facebook and these are http://www.facebook.com/cellulars and http://www.facebook.com/cheapmobilephones. This could be very helpful, enjoy!

If you're getting a new cell phone, just buy a quad band phone. It will work around the world. You may need to register somehow for overseas calling. This may not be the cheapest answer, but it's the easiest.

Oh, one thing to remember. For recharging a cell phone, you'll need adaptors for UK and continental sockets. See www.kropla.com. We bought a phone in Glasgow and used it on the continent (buying new SIM cards). We needed an adaptor to switch from a UK plug to a two-pronged continental socket.

You could also try companies catering to specific locations. Like, for example in the US there's http://okcalls.com or in the UK there's http://okcalls.co.uk.

I'm grateful for all of the recommendations and information.

As it turned out, my DH got sick and our hotel in Lyon had an old-fashioned telephone room. I just called Orbitz and they changed the tickets. Hotel also had a free computer (with European AND US keyboards) so I was able to keep in touch with London driver that way.

It really sounds like the first phone company to issue a truly international phone is what we all need. How and to whom do we lobby for this?

Att will not unlock a phone unless you have a least 6 months of service with them.According to Best Buy-IPHONES cannot be unlocked for overseas travel. Anyone? I need a new cellphone ASAP!

I ended up buying two unlocked used quadband phones on Ebay for $60 total. Put my old SIMs from 2 1/2 years ago in them and they seem to still work. We will see if I can add minutes when I get to Europe, otherwise I will just get two new SIMs and call it good.

We will be there for three weeks so this is a better option than renting or allowing Verizon to over charge me for air time. Also, if I did use my verizon phone then work could get a hold of me.

I found a nerw web site (I don't know if they're new or I had not heard of them before)...they will give you a local phone number in many many places in the world for a $3 set up and $0.99.month (one would suppose you can cancel at any time)...this number can be programmed to forward calls to any phone all over the world at what appear to be excellent rates.

For example, I've been using my local call forwarding when I visit Britain to forward calls. I pay 30¢/minute to forward to a UK mobile....I was able to buy a local number and the same forwarding costs 12.3¢/minute and it seems to go through very quickly so you can buy such a number and either give that numkber to your friends (after you program it,k easily done on the web) or call forward from the verizon phone....

What's the site, xyz???

This came back after 3 years and the moderators removed newer references to different links. In 2014, I'll be going to Madrid and London--will there be two different phone requirements? Thanks.

In recent years, the EU has passed rules that greatly restrict international roaming charges within the EU. Because of this, it rarely makes sense to buy a new SIM card for each European country you visit. I live in Italy, not Spain or the UK, but I imagine that the situation is much the same in those countries. In Italy, most providers allow you to activate an international roaming plan, free, that allows you to make calls at about the same price as if you were at home. When you get your SIM card in Madrid, tell them you will be using it in the UK and ask if they have any plan to reduce the roaming cost.

You might also start a new question, tagged "Spain" asking about international roaming plans offered by Spanish telecoms.

Thanks, bvlenci.