My daughter will be in London for six weeks. She will need a cell to talk with other students in London, and we want to be able to talk to each other while she is abroad. We have Verizon which is a nontransferable system(I think). What is the best plan for us? I have read various previous messages and I am still so confused. Thanks to anyone who can make this simple.

The best solution if calling home is a factor is probably to let her walk into a Carphone Warehouse store, buy whatever is their cheapest special on Mobile World which should include a fairly inexpensive dual band (900/1800) gsm phone with the sim package.

Mobile World has the cheapest rates to call the USA, 5p/minute except during a short period evenings (when it increases to 7.5p/minute) and only 15p/minute to call other UK mobiles and UK landlines while in the UK. The only downside to Mobile World is you can't roam with it outside the UK so if she takes a weekend trip to France, she and you are out of luck.

The alternative to Mobile World is Virgin Mobile which is also cheap but not as cheap as Mobile World (20p to call North America and 15p/minute to call other UK landlines for the first 5 minutes of use each day and after that 5p/minute).

In eithercase, she will not pay for you to call her but you will pay a surcharge of about 25¢/minute above the listed US-UK rate.

Is she going to get a Cell Phone while in london because that would be a little pricey. An alternative phone service is through VOIP. If she will have broadband service in London she can get a phone account from the states and bring the adapter to London. She can get a local number so you can call her for free and she can get a local # in london so calls would be free throughout London also. All said and done it would cost less than $60 total. Again, this wont be a cell phone but an home phone. Check out Vonage.com for more details.

We bought phones (can get used) from www.mobal.com/. Phone were cheap, but service was expensive after 6 weeks. However, she could use it for incoming calls and use phone cards otherwise (these are supposed to be cheaper to use)

>Hi r,

>She will need a cell to talk with other students in London, ...

No she won't. (She might want a cell phone.)

>...we want to be able to talk to each other while she is abroad.<

She can buy an international phone card.

As well as thinking of the cost for her, you need to think about the cost for you. When we went to UK I purchased international phone cards at Walgreens so our family could call us cheaply.

My husband got back from Denmark and Germany and my phone bill for calls I made from US to those countries courtesy of my local telephone company was $1 - $2 a minute! One seventeen minute call of $42. Check your plan. You usually can switch rates for a couple of dollars a month that will give you low internal long distance.

It is funny, I am cautious not to get scalped in other countries and my local telco did me in.

By the way I did use Mobal phone while in UK and was pleased. There less expensive services that you can purchase over there, but it was the least expensive one I found that I could buy here and take with me. If I was over there more than a week I probably would have bought a virgin phone.

>...courtesy of my local telephone company was $1 - $2 a minute! <

If you dial 1016868 first, calls to Europe are about 10 cts/min.

See http://www.10-10phonerates.com/