What kind of phones, phone cards etc are available for use while living in England? I'll be at the university for 9 months and will definitely need to be able to communicate with my family and friends back home in Saskatchewan!

The British post office has a good card & you can use it in Europe, but if you have a PC Yahoo messenger & www.skype.com is about 1 cent a minute or free pc to pc

My niece bought a phone card for use to the States in London & it supposedly was £25 worth for £20 which gave her 700 minutes to be used up within 90 days or 6 months, I can't remember which. I have no idea if that's the best deal available or not. She bought it at a news agent.

She called everyone she knew more than once.

I found the British Telecom phone card (BT) to be an absolute ripoff. Buy a phone card from a corner convenience store, and ask the staff for help on choosing the best one for your needs. I've done very well with this method.

Since she will be living in the UK for 9 months attending university, she will probably need and want a mobile phone. Luckily, British mobile phones are among the cheapest in the world. Assuming she is from the USA and one of her priorities is calling the USA, there are 3 sim cards to recommend. Of course, as somebody felt they had been burned by some advice I gave them, I must add the disclaimer that things in this field often change overnight.

Anyway, my recommendation today is Orange Abroad. The sim card is free (she will need an unlocked gsm phone with 1800 band; if she doesn't have one, she can buy it there or from ebay). Sim card is free, she pays merely for the time. No monthly fees or anything like that. Cost to call the USA with this card is 5p/minute! (doggone almost as cheap as a phone card). She will have a UK number, be able to call her friends and be called. She will not pay to receive calls, you will pay a premium on calls you make to her although to the UK it is not as bad as to other countries. It also allows roaming in other countries if she takes a weekend jaunt say to France and with the new EU tariffs coming in, this won't be all that expensive either.

She might also wish to look into Mobile World from carphone warehouse which also has free sim cards and you pay for talk time. Also 5p to the USA (and to Canada also if you're Canadian; apparently the Orange Abroad doesn't apply to Canada) but no international roaming but cheaper calls to other mobile networks in the UK.

Again the nice thing is the sim cards are FREE and a very small investment at the start of £10 for talk time (which I am sure she will go through in 9 months; she may go through it in two weeks!), Topping up is easy...go into any chemist (pharmacy), petrol (gas) station, grocery chain (no translation needed)with the Orange swipe card they will give you and they will add funds to the account instantaneously.

Of course thereis nothing wrong with the phone card idea but finding public phones to use them with is becoming scarcer and scarcer as almost every 10 year old and up kid walks around with a mobile phone in the UK in this day and age.