Mobile Phones Abroad
It is all very good when we use our mobiles within the UK - cheap rates, nearly total coverage so what more can we ask? It all turns different however, when one wants to call abroad or goes abroad or overseas. Normally international call charges are sky high with all UK providers and as soon as you go abroad a thing called roaming comes into play and you are charged enormously high rates not only for outgoing but also for incoming calls!
Fortunately there are several ways to lower your bills and save on international call charges both when Going Abroad and Calling Abroad. We provide some usefull tips in saving when calling abroad from UK as well as when traveling to other countries.
Going Abroad
Click Here for international GSM SIM cards
Travelling abroad on holidays or making a business trip to a foreign country need not be a waste of money! Normally as soon as you are abroad an international roaming is switched on and you have to pay something about a pound per minute for both outgoing and incoming calls made with your mobile.
Here is the way around it: to avoid excessive call charges you simply need to buy a Pre-Paid SIM card (Pay-and-Go) from one of the telecomm providers in the country you are going to and use it while staying in that country! Simple as this!
However, coming to a foreign country it is not always easy to find where they sell Pay-and-Go SIM-only packs. Quite often they do sell it at airports but believe me I always forget to buy one on arrival. In any case buying one before you go seems like a good idea. Not only it will save you time and hasle of buying a PayAndGo SIMcard on arrival, you will also know your new mobile number in advance, so all your friends and colleagues will know which number to call while you are abroad.
There are two advantages in this solution:
» local rates will apply to all outgoing calls you make from your mobile within the foreign country
» you will not be charged excessive roaming rates for incoming calls (in fact in most cases you will not be charged for incoming calls at all)
All this in addition to having a local tel number of the country you are going to.
There is however one substantial setback in this approach: you calls from abroad to UK numbers will still be charged as international calls. The workaround is to text to the one you want to talk to asking to call you back using cheap accrss numbers (see Calling Abroad and International sections). This way you will be able to keep the actual cost of your international calls in most countries roughly within 1p to 15p compare to £1 to £1.80 using normal rouming. I know it sounds a bit troublesome to do all this but in fact it is extremely easy when you actually do it and as savings are so high it is really worth trying!
You can buy Pay-and-Go SIM cards from many foreign providers at our International section but if you are going to a country we do not have Pay-and-Go SIM cards for - this site (Click Here).
Important if your phone is locked to a particular network it needs to be unlocked to work on other GSM networks! If you need to unlock your mobile go to our Unlocking section to find out more.
Hint: if you go abroad and decide to use their local GSM provider with their SIM card one thing may come very handy - Twin SIM Adapters. Dual (Twin, Triple etc) SIM covers allow you to switch between two or more different SIM cards without opening your phone. Of course you can not use two at the same time but when you switch often between two different providers a Dual SIM cover is a must! Our Twin SIM Adapters section offers a good selection of dual simcard covers and we also stock a massive selection of ghost twin sim adapters .
Hint: going to americas (USA or Canada) many find that their older GSM phones stop working there. This is because GSM networks in UK (as well as on the continent) use different GSM standard from North American ones. To ensure that your mobile phone will work in North America make sure that supports both European and American GSM standards. Such phones are called Tri-band because they subbort both Anerican frequency band (1900) and two European bands (900 and 1800). To find which phone supports Tri-band just type Tri-band or better even Quad-band in our search box.
Also it would be a good idea to insure your mobile before going abroad! Go to our Mobile Insurance section to find out more!
Calling Abroad
Having costs of UK local and national calls on GSM networks relatively low we naturally want to have proportinately low costs for our international calls. Until recently if you wanted to call abroad cheap you had to use landline phones as various cheap international telecomm providers worked only with BT landlines. Now we can have it all on our mobiles too!
After searching for the cheapest and the most convinient international call provider we came up with these two services:
KWIKdial - allows users to top up their mobiles via text message and use this credit for cheap international calls. Rates are about 1p to 5p per minute for almost all popular destinations like USA, Canada, Spain, Italy, Germany, France etc. Uses 0800 free access number. You can also topup your landline the same way or use KWIK-dial access numbers.
TopUp2Call - similar to KWIKdial but has an affiliate referral programme as well.
