French Pay as you go mobile

[Choochoo]

Hi everyone

When we moved over to France we bought a PAYG sim card for Orange F to convert one of our mobiles to French. It all works fine but if you dont use all your credit within a certain time you lose it! . I know this used to happen in UK but that was a hundred years ago ! Does anyone know a way round this ? We only want it for occasional use, emergencies, car breakdown etc. Seems to me Orange F could do with a bit of healthy competition from one of the other mobile companies.

Thanks for any advice.

John & Sue (50)

[Boghound]

[quote]Hi everyone When we moved over to France we bought a PAYG sim card for Orange F to convert one of our mobiles to French. It all works fine but if you dont use all your credit within a certain time yo...[/quote]

Welcome to France!

If you only need it for dire emergencies, why not put your old Orange UK sim card back in and register an UK credit card with them so you can top the sim up when you want to. Then all you have to do is use the phone once every six months to keep the PAYG sim current.

[Jackie]

We have the same problem. When we arrived we tried to have a French Sim card inserted into our UK Orange phone but it did not work so we had to buy a more recent type phone here. Like you we only want this for emergency use. We did not use the phone for over 6 months and lost the number. So more expense to get the thing up and working again so it is important to use it before the six months is up, also the PAYG cards we use are only valid for two months once activated. Still hoping that someone will come up with a system of unlimited time to use up the credit on the card as we had in the UK but have not found anything yet........Bon courage.....John in Dept 79 

[Miki]

I have posted this before but we pay a monthly fee of just 7€ to Orange and top up the card every so often. The amount you use depends of course how often you use the phone but we use it just for call forwarding and very few outgoing calls. The top up costs from 10€ to 50€ maybe more? but has no time limit. 

Not sure if the deal is still available but it may well be worth popping in to a local FT shop and asking.

[Nick Trollope]

You could buy a voucher and not register it until your "emergency" happens. I don't think that unused vouchers expire.....

[Ecossais]

If you really expect to use your mobile very infrequently you might want to consider using a UK network SIM in your phone.

 

Obviously making (and receiving) calls on it in France will be more expensive than with a French SIM (and calls to the mobile from your landline would be charged as an international call).  However you should weigh up the higher cost of calls against having to top up a French SIM when you still have plenty of credit.

 

The cheapest pay as you go network to use abroad looks like Virgin, if you pay for your calls by direct debit (there’s no monthly rental – you just get billed for the calls you make.)

 

Calls made in Europe from a Virgin mobile are 60p per minute (Orange charge £1.20).  A Virgin SIM costs around £10 and includes £5 call credit.  Further details:

 

http://www.virginmobile.com/mobile/services/abroad/paymonthly/tariff_coverage.jsp

 

Your mobile may need to be “unlocked” in order to work with a SIM card other than the original network.  (If you have a UK Orange mobile it will only work with Orange SIMs unless you get it unlocked – another cost to consider!)