Getting a mobile phone in England

Hi

Is your Aussie phone unlocked? It will need to be to use a different sim card in. You can buy sim cards for the UK all over the place. There are mobile phone shops on all town and city high streets. Look out for Carphone Warehouse, Phones4U and all the brand name shops. You can also buy them in most supermarkets. However, it's also really cheap to buy a pay as you go phone in the UK. You can get a basic one for the same price as a sim (about £10).

The major companies are Vodafone, Orange and O2. Are you wanting to use your phone to phone home, or just to call within the UK? Obviously with some packages, phoning abroad is expensive, with others, it isn't. You usually don't pay for inward calls, check that this includes calls from abroad.

Your best bet will be to go into a mobile phone shop when you arrive and ask them which company has the best deals, as they change regularly to get more customers.

Hope this helps.

Kate


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Have a look at the websites for the companies I mention above. That will give you an idea of costs. I would expect that everything in the UK is going to seem expensive to you! It's a pretty expensive country generally.

All the information I gave above was for pre-paid phones, known as 'pay as you go' in the UK. You can get different kinds. You can either buy top ups as your credit runs out, or you can get monthly deals where you top up a set price per month and get a certain number of texts and/or amount of call credit. Both are pre-pay.

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I imagine it will be quite expensive to call and text back to Australia, if you're doing this often then go with an international simcard or just use international calling cards for these calls. You should never have to pay for incoming calls though. For local calls and texts all the companies are roughly the same, and most offer packages which give you cheaper texts/calls to people on the same network. Just compare the pay as you go and international tariffs for the various companies on their websites... the major ones are Vodafone, Orange, O2 and T-Mobile.

This will sound a bit strange, but be warned that you will be relentlessly bullshitted at if you try and buy a pay-as-you-go phone in a phone shop in the UK. People who work in these shops really, really don't know when to shut up, and often won't take no for an answer when you say you're not interested in a contract. The best thing to do is to tell them you want a pay as you go phone rather than a contract because you're leaving the country in a few months - whenever I go to replace my phone I always have to say that and put on a foreign accent, otherwise they won't let me leave the shop, because that's the only valid reason why anyone would possibly not want to sell their soul to them.

If you just want to buy a sim card on its own, you can usually get them in newsagents for about £3 nowadays. I think phone shops charge a bit more for just a sim card.

HTH Reply to this

You must have the global travel phone card ! Its verry easy to call and i have take this card in england and vietnam. Reply to this

Global roaming SIMs are interesting, but for someone in one place for a while a local SIM will be better, so the advice in the above post is a bit weak, and may well come from the firm in question

There are several UK virtual brands with cheap international rates starting from 3 pence a minute

Globalcell, IDT Mobile, Lebara, Lycamobile, Mobile World, Nomi, Talkmobile, Vectone,

And the main networks have reasonable int'l rates from 5p, particularly Vodafone and Orange's Camel tariff.

Also, there is a callthrough provider Yourcallworld which can be used with Orange and T-mobile for from 3 pence a minute.

For cheap int'l texts, look at Fishtext, which uses data to send an equivalent for a couple of pence each


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hi,

If you are travelling , you can also think about using a call diverter,this if installed in your home address, will divert your calls to the internet, and you can use them where ever you are, throe internet, skype phone etc. your incoming calls are 100%!f(MISSING)ree and outgoing charged by your home line rate.

daniel

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It seems like a prepaid international sim card is your best bet. I've heard good things about OneSimCard; although you should do some research on your own (like comparing rates, etc...) before making a final choice. As a backup plan, consider using international phone cards. I think they still offer the cheapest rates. Here is an article on how to select the right international phone card. Reply to this

Hi again Stacey, it's so excellent you have made it to the UK as planned, well done! :D

You have also inadvertently posted the same advice on mobile phones that I would have posted! I definitely think O2 is the best provider in the UK for a prepaid mobile service. Not only that but as O2 is such a huge European country which means you will often automatically transfer to a foreign O2 network whilst abroad. Vodafone also has this advantage but O2 really won me over with the freetime and huge volume of texts. Using my freetime for my international calling card to phone home saved me so much money and my texts to Oz are 5p!

El Reply to this