UK Mobile Phone Advice Needed
 

We'll be in England & Scotland 2 weeks this summer--starting in London. Need phone service in UK as well as International (Japan/US)--quick calls only. Is there a way we do this inexpensively? Thank you!

I don't know where you're from. I'm from the USA. All the major UK carriers seem to have excellent pay as you go plan if you have an unlocked gsm phone. I used O2 and had them send a free payg sim card to my hotel address before leaving home. All I had to do is pop it into an unlocked gsm phone I had t mobile unlock for me when I upgraded (done over the phone and very easy), topped up for £10 and was in business. Calls to the USA were 2p/minute coming out of that £10. Receiving calls was free. I didn't check rates to Japan; you can do so on their web site but I suspect they are very cheap. However, calls within the UK were not all that cheap on this particular plan. You got, for the 10 quid, an allowance for texts and data....topping up for 15 quid to start would have given you a UK call allowance on top of this. Vodafone and EE both have similar plans with very cheap international calls.

Interestingly enough, it would (and is) cheaper to use my t mobile plan in the UK at least for calls within the UK which would be 20¢/minute US and unlimited data with my new tmobile phone...my hotel also had wifi as do places like Mickey D or pret a manger to use with the O2 plan. All the information is on the various web sites.

If your phone is unlocked you could also sign up for a month-to-month plan with T-Mobile and then cancel when you get home. (Although I use that same plan at home as when I'm traveling.) For $50/month I get unlimited low speed data, unlimited texts and 20 cent/minute calls in 120 countries. In the US I get unlimited calls and text, 1 gig of high speed data and unlimited low speed. The local SIM would be cheaper if you just want to make a few calls, but you'd have to look into the data costs/allowance if you wanted to use that.

Well the obvious solution is to get a dual sim phone which I have (many are available on ebay for not all that much I picked up a Samsung 5 mini whose price dropped when the Samsung 6 came out. One slot has the t mobile US sim card, the other the O2 sim I referred to above. Voila; the best of both worlds....

Good thinking, xyz. But I'm going to nine countries on my next trip, easier - for me - just to use T-Mobile. (BTW, just bought a non-mini S5 - such an improvement over my old phone!)

T-Mobile unlimited text/data in Europe and elsewhere? Greatest thing since...phones IMO!!!

T-mobile is working for me too!
I switched last November and have used it in the US, UK, Ireland, France and Egypt. I particularly like being able to use it stopovers! I'll be using it in Finland and Germany before heading back to California in mid-July. It works because I can live with slow data and we default to texting most of the time.

I was a great user of local sims and would still go this way if I needed faster data or to make a lot of calls. Someone recently pointed out that some places in Europe are not included e.g.:Bosnia, but so far it has been fab for us.

thursdayd...yes I do like the tmobile plan. But not everybody is Americans. For Americans, it is indeed a great plan.

I will never understand why Sprint and Verizon did not go gsm when it has become the world standard.

Not everyone can get T-Mobile. They only have two stores in the entire state of Arkansas and very limited service. My SIL works for them at HQ and could not use his phone here in the Ouachita Mountains until he switched it to wifi.

You can buy a Mobal phone for $29 that will work in every country without any additional SIM cards. They give you a permanent phone number in the UK and charge by the minute. The fees are a little higher than some other sources but still very cheap if you're just doing short calls. I have used mine all over the world--the only place it didn't work was Ecuador because it has a non-standard phone system.

http://www.mobal.com/international-cell-phones/

Here's how I travel:
1. Mobal phone for actual phone calls (which are usually just for local information)
2. My droid phone set on airplane mode with wifi on; filled with downloaded travel apps such as Rick Steve's walking tour podcasts
3. Kindle Fire HD, again with wifi, for emails and searching
4. Stay only in hotels with free wifi; locate hotspots like Starbucks and McDonald's.
5. Skype for phone calls home if I have wifi
6. All my music is loaded onto an iPod Touch, separate from a phone function, so I have a permanent music collection unrelated to my current phone. It is also wireless, so I can download travel apps on it as well.

I rarely make a phone call--I can use email for just about everything I need.