geetika

We're spending a week in Ireland next month and want to get a sim card for that period, this will just be for calls, not data. We are flying from Southampton to Cork, will we be able to buy the sim card at the airport? We'll be picking up a rental car and driving straight to Galway, so will need to get this either at the airport or somewhere close by.

Any provider I should avoid, any dos and don'ts? As always I look forward to your comments, thanks in advance

Tony2phones

I use http://www.tescomobile.ie/ If you are in the UK first and have a UK sim card in your phone you can use that for calls and texts in Ireland. I have a Tesco Sim in my UK phone as well.

geetika

Tony2phones, so I can buy a Tesco sim for use in the UK and Ireland too? That's great, thanks for the tip!

xyz123

Just leave it at this...you can use any UK sim card just about in the Republic of Ireland and at the very worst it is covered by the new eu regs regarding roaming within Europe. As long as you are not calling outside Europe, it really doesn't matter all that much. Irish sim cards will probably give you the best rate within Ireland for calls and texts and you will have to check each provider for its policy to call outside Europe from within Ireland. That's why in giving advice, one has to be aware of just what you want to do with the sim card. Tesco bought n Ireland will piggy back on one of the Irish providers towers but will have its own policies on these things regarding call costs, text costs, data costs. That is why, and I am not implying for one second that anybody is right or wrong, people wherever possible should do their own research on one of the web sites for the actual plans.

rs899

"We're spending a week in Ireland next month and want to get a sim card for that period, this will just be for calls, not data. "

Where will you be calling? If you can work out to do your calling when you will be near wifi, you can use Google Hangouts and Hangouts Dialer back to the US for free.

But, yes, as xyz123 says, though it is goog to get ideas from the forum, go to the provider websites if you don't want to be surprised.

Tony2phones

My Tesco UK phone gets regular messages about Welcome to Ireland.

Calls to EU (includes Ireland and UK are 4 pence (5 cent) per min Texts cost 1 pence so its actually cheaper to text on my UK phone than my Irish phone.


If calling the USA from Ireland on a Tesco UK sim card it will cost £0.69/min calling the USA from Ireland using an Irish Tesco sim card will cost €0.01/min. so basically the UK sim costs 68pence per min over the cost from an Irish sim Texts are the same 1 pence. Calling USA from the UK on a Tesco Sim card costs 25 pence per minute.

It does advise to turn OFF Data so not to incur those charges. As you only want calls and texts and not data it makes sense to keep the UK sim card for the week you are here, Unless the bulk of your calls are to countries outside the EU.

geetika

Thanks all of you. I will be using the phone mainly to call our hotel, the rental car agency and a couple of other people in Ireland. For calls to the US and going online I will use the hotel wifi and WhatsApp/Viber, this has worked exceedingly well for us on past trips. My apologies for not being precise in my original post.

I do agree that going to provider websites will give me details of the specific costs.

Thanks again