My daughter will shortly be departing for her year abroad in Finland as part of her degree. She will be there from end August to June 2011.
At present she has a Nokia mobile and a Vodafone sim card. She is signed up to Passport, so for a flat fee of 75p she can make phone calls and use her UK allowance. We can also phone her using our minutes as it is a UK mobile.
Texts cost 10p each and are not included in her allowance.
She will probably want to get a sim card out there for daily use, but is there any way of getting cheaper texts, as we find it a very good way of keeping in touch in between the phone calls? We both are on Virgin mobile, but could change if needed.
|
|
Forget mobiles, you need skype or computer type instant messaging for communication back home. She is bound to have access to a pc, as do you (or you wouldnt be on here)
|
I think someone said on here 3 - the company - are big into incorporating Skype into their phones.
Might be worth looking into if daughter wants to talk over a handset rather than being tied to a computer.
|
Not sure how Passport works, but it's possible/likely that she will have to pay to receive calls from you on her UK mobile (14p/min on O2).
We live in Austria and do the reverse - using texts etc to keep in touch with our son in the UK. I use Skype to send texts at 6p, which can be made to appear as if coming from her UK mobile, so that you can reply and it appears on her actual phone. We haven't cracked this problem either by the way!
You can get cheaper calls using telediscount at telediscount.co.uk - and the same company operates in Austria giving us calls to UK landlines at 2.2 cents per minutes, and UK mobiles at 14.5 cents per minute.
Lastly, yes, Skype is a good option but can be iffy quality.
|
Check with your home phone supplier.
£6.00 /mth gives me unlimited to calls in W European landlines - max 60 min in one call then you redial.
Calls to son when in USA is only 2 p / min calling his US Mobile number (not his UK mobile #).
In vestigate thoroughly as a former work colleague's daughter went to Hong Kong and rang up £600+ in a month on her orange mobile - he spent £400 calling her from his UK landline....... neither is the sharpest tool in the box when it comes to money and thinking in advance.
|
I use Vodafone Passport on a pretty much daily basis, saves me about 40 quid a month. My outgoing calls back home from Stockholm are indeed 75p - plus my normal call rate - i.e. no extra charge if within my monthly allowance, normal rates if I exceed it.
The only annoyance is if my call drops after a couple of seconds, or I get the home answerphone, it's still 75p for the call.
Incoming calls have the same 75p charge (although no impact on my monthly minutes allowance)
Incoming text messages are free, (not sure if that's always the case).
I gave up on Skype pretty quickly, even living in a city with then most developed cellular infrastructure outside Japan there are plenty of areas of poor / non existent coverage. If your daughter is staying in a few places with known good internet bandwidth probably worth giving it a go.
One thing I must do shortly is get a Swedish data centric prepay SIM for occasional email etc. via 3G, as Vodafone data roaming charges are still scary IIRC.
|
My solution is this.
Skype is excellent quality unless your internet connection is dodgy - a good solution for calling when at home. My experience is it is crap on a mobile data connection - latency is too high for it to work properly. I use SKype as my exclusive work land line, with a UK and a US number on the line. Sign up for a UK skype-in number (I think it's about £40 for a year) and you will be able to call the skype account from a UK phone at normal UK call cost (I have a 0121 number but you can chose the area).
Buy a local mobile in Finland. The set up a forward on your Skype account so that any calls coming in to the number divert to your local mobile. You'll need Skype Out credit for this, but the rates are very cheap (for instance a call to my US cell is 1.2p/minute).
Set your UK mobile to divert to your UK Skype-in number. That way you only need to remember to check for any incoming UK text messages once in a while.
Register for a free Skype-out number for Finland. Then she can call that local number from her Finnish cell phone, then dial through to any international number using her Skype minutes. UK is 1.2p/minute.
I know this all sounds contrived, but this way if someone calls her UK mobile, it diverts to her new local cell phone at a cost of a UK call (the divert) and an international Skype call (not much). It's transparent, although it can take 5-10 seconds to connect.
And no, I don't work for or have any association with Skype, other than as someone that is in the US a lot. The above has reduced my phone bills by about £80 a month.
Hope that helps, happy to answer any questions.
Last edited by: Statistical Outlier on Sun 15 Aug 10 at 22:15
|
Thanks for all the above and will pass them on.
No solution for getting cheap texts then?
|
I've not found a solution to sending cheap texts from the phone.
I have my mobile # registered with skype for the international calling thing, so I can send texts through Skype on a PC or Mac that look like they have come from my phone - I think it costs about 6p?
I don't know if a decent app might be able to do the same on a smartphone? I'm probably getting either an android or an iPhone in the next few weeks, I'll report back.
|
|
At 10p a pop, texts are cheap.
|
...At 10p a pop, texts are cheap....
Not if you send dozens and dozens a day as some of the young ones do.
|
|
well you dont do that do you, how damn cheap do you want this stuff, its not a public service, its a business.
|
...its not a public service, its a business...
Never, is it really?
I'm just saying the unit cost is only cheap overall if you don't use a lot of units.
Texts are cheap to me - I hardly ever send any.
|
>> At 10p a pop, texts are cheap.
>>
Like he said, but i'm 99% sure that texts to/from my UK Vodafone SIM when in Sweden are free, presumably as unlimited texts are part of my package. I have been know to send as many as 14 in one month....I'll try and double check online as i'm about 1000 miles from the paper copy of my last phone bill at the moment.
|
"At 10p a pop, texts are cheap."
I think that's an outrageous amount for sending a byt of data and tying up the network for a billionth of a second
|
|
Given the cost of setting up the network, its dirt cheap. If you dont like it, dont use it, use a carrier pigeon or something.
|
"Given the cost of setting up the network, its dirt cheap."
That's like saying a bag of sugar should be £50 just because it's expensive to build an Asda store.
|
|
of course its not. You could sell sugar from the side of the road without a store, you cant send texts without investment in the infrastructure.
|
You could sell sugar from the side of the road. But Asda don't sell from the side of the road. They invest hundreds of million of pounds in infrastructure. But they don't use that as an excuse to sell a lettuce for £95. (just injecting some variety here)
The price of a text, in comparison with the price of a call is ridiculous.
|
How many people remember the first GSM mobiles. Most did not support text. In fact I am fairly certain texts were an engineers tool and not meant for us. My first mobile (an Ericcson) could receive but not send texts. Then they realised there was money to be made.
The Nokia 2110 of the time could send texts BTW:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nokia_2110.JPG
A bit of a brick... compare it to my small e51 or even a Motorola Droid X come to that!
|
>> At 10p a pop, texts are cheap.
>>
With Asda (vodafone network, and locked vodafone phones work with Asda payg SIMs) PAYG, it is 8p a call and 4p a text. Get a stock of their latest SIMs, and in effect you pay half that. ie 4p a call and 2p a text, until you have used up all the airtime on your stock of SIMs.
www.asdamobile.com/sim_pack.html
ASDA Mobile SIM Pack £5.00 - Includes £10 FREE airtime!
|
I also use an Asda SIM for short calls, again I think incoming txts are free to me. Calls home are 35ppm tho so I Only use it
for short calls. TBH I have more phone numbers than your average drugs baron at the moment.
|
Use of mobile phone abroad - Zero
