Hi all!!!
I know this subject has been discussed many times on this board and have done a search and brought them up. But, they are older threads, so, I thought I'd ask for more current (if any) info!!!

If one, from the USA, were looking to use a cell phone in the UK for a trip, what would your suggestions be?

I've been researching for an upcoming trip and have used Travel Cell (http://www.travelcell.com/) in the past! Not real happy with their service...looking into my cell carrier (Verizon)to see what they can offer (very high, in my opinion), so, I thought I'd ask what everyone here thinks!!!

Thanks to all!!!!

The UK is particularly easy and cheap with mobile (the proper European term BTW) prepaids. I assume you know all about the fact that the UK uses a system called GSM which is totally incompatible with Verizon's CDMA and from your post I assume Verizon is your US carrier.

Therefore you will need:

1. A GSM phone with both the 900 and 1800 bands. Be careful about buying a made for America GSM phone which will lack 900 and limit your options to some degree. You can buy the phone here through ebay and/or many internet providers.....make sure it is unlocked (it most likely will be if you buy it through ebay or one of the internet seller but make sure that is in the specs)...or you can wait till you get to the UK to buy the phone.

2. Upon arrival you can go into any mobile phone store, and they are found literally on every other block in London and buy a prepaid sim pack and/or a phone if you don't already have one. The phone you buy in the UK will most likely but not always be locked to the mobile phone provider you ultimately choose.

3. Assuming your prime wish is to be able to call back to the US, the best choice right now is something called Mobile World available at Carphone Warehouse. The sim card costs something like £5 and then you load it with time. Calls to the USA cost 5p/minute except for a brief prime time period in the evening when it jumps 50% to 7.5 p/minute...or you can go with Virgin Mobile in one of the Virgin Megastores where calls to the USA cost 20p/minute but they are timed to the second not raised to the next highest minute...calls within the UK on Mobile World cost 15p/minute and on Virgin Mobile are 15p/minute for the first 5 minutes of use each day and then 5p/minute the rest of the day.

You will have a British phone number with country code 44 and the number will start with a 7...be aware that you will have to let your friends know your number via text messaging or the internet and also be aware that in almost all cases if they call you, they will pay in the vicinity of 30¢/minute to call you even though UK rates to landlines can be in the vicinity of 2¢/minutes if you use certain calling cards (Bizon comes to mind)..

Hope that helps you...getting a British sim card these days is very easy as because of the competition there, the companies are literally giving the sim cards away for next to nothing.

Other British mobile carriers include vodafone, O2, T Mobile UK and there are ways to use O2 to get very cheap calls back to the US but that involves a little more research on your part (essentially they give you 100 free minutes with any £10 top up and there are numbers that exist in the UK that you can call, pay for a UK local call and then get free ld to most any country in the world but the charge for the UK call on a prepaid sim can be as much as 30p/minute...lots of good suggestions on www.prepaidgsm.net and you can run questions through there and there are several folks who live in the UK on that board who know what they're talking about (unlike unfortunately some on this board who spew out wrong information).

Hope this helps you.

If you want a phone for only brief and occasional use, you can get a Virgin Mobile for as little as $50 - with £5 airtime on it. http://tinyurl.com/m9lwg

Orange has a similar deal, but their airtime is more expensive.

http://shop.orange.co.uk/shop/show/h.../pay_as_you_go

I just thought of another possible solution for you...

Personally I am not a fan of Mobal for the reason that roaming rates outside the UK are outrageously high and you pay to both make and receive calls as you do if you use the international roaming facilities of Cingular and T Mobile US.

Having said that, mobal will provide you with an inexpensive mobile phone which may or may not be locked and a sim card which is in effect an O2 UK account...you will, while in the UK, get the free reception of calls that is the way it is done in the rest of the world outside North America, the caller pays a surcharge. You will have a UK number with its 44 country code now..

You will have to check their web site to see what local rates are for calls within the UK. An ld call say from bizon as I noted comes with a London based local access number 020... and if calls within the UK are not too expensive then you dial that and use the bizon card to call back to the USA (2¢/minute).....or if calls within the UK are expensive, then you can open up an account with callbackworld.com, use their international callback service at about 30¢/minute to call the US timed to the second...if you don't understand callback systems, they work like this. When you open up the account (free) they assign you a dedicated number in the US (no wonder the US is running out of phone numbers)...you ring that number on your phone and allow it to ring twice and hang up. No charge as the call has not been completed....seconds later they call (you) back, hence the name callback and you hear a female voice say please enter number you are called followed by the # sign now and you do it and voila seconds later the phone you are calling is ringing!

As I said, it's fine while you're in the UK and might be the simplest solution of all but not the best IMHO.

I did the research for you....

Mobal charges $1.25/minute to make a local call within the UK, outrageously high so the bizon option is out.

They charge $1.50/minute to call the US from the UK, outrageously high so that option is out.

However since you indeed get the free reception of calls in the UK, the callbackworld option is very viable if you want to go in that direction.

xyz123
You mentioned buying an unlocked phone on ebay. Is there any particular model that works best for the UK but also the rest of europe. A mobile world sim card sounds best for the UK, are there particular brands that you should purchase when you go to other european countries.

Here's what I did when I went to England at Christmas:

Rather than stress about whether my Canadian mobile would work over there and what it would cost, I went into the nearest mobile phone store in the town I was staying (as xyz says, they are everywhere) and bought the cheapest UK mobile - 19.99 pounds, nothing special, but enough to make calls and send texts.

I got a pay-as-you-go plan from Orange; they give you a card that you swipe at any corner store - you can add on as little as 5 pounds. I topped mine up twice, once in Yorkshire, once in London. Simple.

It worked great for me - all I wanted was to be able to call friends, etc. and make one call back to Canada.

I'm off to England again tomorrow (!) and my UK mobile is in my purse, ready to go!

Worked for me...

Tania

Thank-you...all of you for your responses!!!

Here's the reason for my wanting to get a phone. There will be 5 of us on this trip with one car...2 of us (my Mom and I) will be in the UK for almost 3 weeks and my Mom already has a phone (through her cell phone provider...she set that up and is happy with it) for all us to use. The other 3 (my husband, sister and brother-in-law) will be there for the first 10 days and there will be times when we are not all together. The guys will more then likely be off doing things they enjoy some of the time (get dropped off for golf/fishing for the day) while us gals are doing something we enjoy for a day. Having a second phone would make it easier to keep in touch with each other when the group is split! Plus, it would allow the 3 leaving first (my husband would take it) to still have the ability to make calls (either to us or the US) when they head back into London the day before they fly back to the States.

Again...thank-you...xyz123, Robespierre &TaniaP...you have given me some great info to look into to find what is best for us!!!

Hello all, a few more naive questions on this topic. I am looking to do the following:
1. Get 2 cheap cell phones for a 3 week stay in England/Scotland/Ireland.
2. We only need them to communicate between ourselves (when we are split up for the day doing different things), or for other local calls (like calling ahead to B&Bs, etc..)
3. NO intention at all of using the phones to call the US or receive calls from the US (we'll be staying in touch using calling cards and email)

Does most of the advice in this thread still apply? The only (potentially) new wrinkles I had were that (1) we need the phones to work in Ireland and Scotland also, as well as England and (2) we only need them for local calling. Also, with the way technology changes, I thought cheapo phones might be best (since they could be obsolete in a year!) Thanks very much.

The phones themselves will not be obsolete soon...there are millions and millions of gsm phones out there and it would take a decade to replace them all and make current technologies obsolete...new technologies are indeed coming out very quickly but won't mean your phone as a receiving instrument will be obsolete...many of the new phones have all sorts of bells and whistles you are not really interested in so a cheap dual band (900/1800) phone will do fine for your purposes.

Most any British network is fine...if you have time you can get cheap virgin mobile sims off of ebay which come with 5 quid of talk time and calls between Virgin mobile phones are cheap and they indeed allow roaming in the Republic of Ireland....vodafone uk might be good too as is O2...both have dropped roaming fees in the Republic of Ireland.

Of all the countries, British sim prices are the cheapest and easiest to acquire and easy to understand. Mobile World would not be an alternative as it does not allow roaming outside the UK so it would be useless in the Republic of Ireland (as opposed to Northern Ireland which is part of the UK)....

Xyz, thanks very much for the information. I posted something else today (I was looking for an electronics store in London) and people were steering me to a chain store called Maplin. Would that be an OK place to get a phone also, or could you recommend another store in London? Thanks again!

Go to one of the cellular providers, like Virgin or Orange. I think they've got the hottest deals.

http://www.virginmobile.com/mobile/c...NOK-STD-1101-1
http://shop.orange.co.uk/shop/show/h.../pay_as_you_go

Well,I finally did it. I purchased a unlocked GSM tri band cell phone off of ebay. It should arrive in the next couple of days.

Now, here's my question again. I will be traveling to Paris, Lisbon and England for one month. I would like to purchase a Sim card that I could use in all three countries. I would like to be able to call home (California) and within each country as well as from country to country. Is there one card that will allow all of these things?

ttt

Local calls within each country will not be all that convenient with an international card but it's probably the best solution.

Today's best solution is probably to get a local sim for the UK for next to nothing (you can get one for Virgin Mobile on ebay) and then switch to a United Mobile sim when in the other countries. Couple the United Mobile with a callbackworld account and you will be able to call both back to the USA and locally for not too much...