Mobile phone contracts in France - is there any cheap option?

delicioushotorcold

Hi,

I am currently living in France, and will be at least until next April, and then for the forseeable future after September 2010. I'm looking for a phone contract similar to my own in England, which was a retention offer from Orange, so I know it doesn't really count, but I was paying £22.50/month with 600 mins unlimited texts and 25mb data, along with a free phone worth £450, on an 18 month contract.

I went to an Orange shop here, and they tried to offer me something insane like €177/month for pretty much the same as I had in England. But looking around I have found a better deal at €25/month with 90 mins unlimited texts and unlimited data. For some reason voice calls are the most expensive thing here; when I told them I had 600 minutes they couldn't believe it. The standard contracts here are all 1 or 2 hours... (for some reason it's measured in hours not minutes here). Anyway as I said the €25/month (bouygues telecom/universal) seems to be the best deal around, and I can get a nokia 5310 for €9 with that, but before I went ahead I wanted to ask if anyone has found the cheap solution! There doesn't seem to be any cashback system here, even at "The Phone House" the Carphone Warehouse's french brother.

Anyone with experience of this I would love to hear from you,

thanks

fsrandom

The UK is the cheapest in the world for mobile telecommunications, as I've said in previous posts people don't realise how good we have it here.

Unfortunately, you won't find anything even close to what you get in the UK abroad, it's a case of paying up or tightining up your usage.