Mobile Phone Contracts

richard55

Seeking some advice on mobile phone contracts.
I currently have a Vodafone Pay as You Go contract which I top up when necessary. I have found this to be fine for my needs in the UK. However, I have recently be doing a lot of travelling abroad on business and need the security of having a phone which I can use at any time without worrying about whether I am going to run out of credit. Also calls made on Pay as you go are very expensive whilst abroad. In some places I travel it is not an easy job to arrange a top up. Can anyone advise me if it is possible to change to a contract whereby I pay only for calls made on a direct debit basis without also having to pay a line rental charge?

kai666

virgin and orange i think you can set up direct debits on pay as you go so it will automatically top up when you get below a certain point. not completely sure. Someone more in the know might like to confirm or deny this

redux

This does sound like Virgin post-paid by DD, but even so there will be fairly high roaming charges, like from 60p/min to call, 30p receive.

You could look into using foreign SIM card(s), but these will also be pre-paid. Rather than a card for each country, some global roaming SIMs have incoming calls free in many countries. But if you spend a lot of time in one or two countries, I would think about a local SIM there, and use with calling card or callback. Some tariffs will allow calling ard use home for only a few pence a minute, and callback (which can be post-paid by credit card) costs around 15p per minute for many countries SIMs to UK landline.

info on tariffs and links to network providers on
http://www.prepaidgsm.net/en/operators.html

But your Vodafone SIM may be handy enough. If you register it for their Passport scheme, then when used on their affiliated Vodafone networks abroad you pay a connection charge of 75p per call, and then your normal call charges as at home. Also you can use foreign Vodafone top-up vouchers.

More info, please ask