calling the UK via mobile from abroad

ocemeer

Help please

currently have a contract phone with orange - yet am away 75% of the time abroad so make little use of it. (and abroad tend to use texts more than phone calls)
Is there anyway of having a decent mobile phone bill and being able to make phone calls from abroad homw without breaking the bank?

redux

Yes there are, and progressively cheaper depending on how complicated you get

O2 has calls at 35 pence a minute now, and Vodafone has its Passport scheme, which has a connection fee then calls at the home tariff, but I don't see a lot of point in you changing to these if you are away that much.

You can use a foreign SIM card in an unlocked phone, either a local payg SIM per country, or one of a number of global roaming SiMs that have free incoming calls in several countries.

Some local SIMs have international calls as cheap as 5 to 8 pence a minute, from an ever-increasing number of virtual providers. But some are still even 50 pence a minute or so. The global SIMs available so far are from Liechtenstein, Estonia, Iceland, Germany, and Isle of Man, and have tariffs from typically 20 or 30 pence a minute to landlines. But cheaper is possible ...

Here is Martin's article about roaming
http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/cgi-bin/viewnews.cgi?newsid1119870249,48922,

- and the discussion article relating to it
http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?p=2530781#post2530781

Martin doesn't make as much of separate callback services, which can avoid local tariffs by connecting two incoming calls together, either to/from landlines or mobiles. These are particularly useful with local SIMs with higher tariffs, eg France, or can be used with the global SIMs too.

Depending on which countries you are in most of the time, I'd probably suggest a global SIM with an IoM number, or maybe local SIMs as well, expecially Belgium, Netherlands, Sweden Germany and a few others with low rates, one or two via calling card access.

local country SIMs detailed at
http://www.prepaidgsm.net/en/operators.html

Getting more complicated, it is possible to find one or two interesting tariffs and use separate VoIP providers and callback services, but this is rather tricky to explain and use, so can wait for maybe later

seaniboy

voda payg is the best, passport on that

after a couple of months call them say you wanna go on a 12/18 month contract but dont require a new phone as your current 1 is top of the range just now, score a great deal ( check the deals on Vodafone.co.uk 1st that come with a handset )

seaniboy

PS) not on Orange no, thier good for calling INT with 07744 access

redux

seaniboy wrote:

voda payg is the best, passport on that

a 3 minute call would cost £1.65 with Vodafone payg

daytime, only calls over quarter of an hour are cheaper on Vodafone than O2 payg

on Simyo Belgium calls are 5 cents a minute to Belgian landlines, and a calling card could add 2c/min on top. Lebara Sweden has direct-dialled calls to UK for 3 pence a minute. Holland has 3 or 4 virtual networks with calls to UK at 12c/min. Using callback with any number of SIMs can be 13 to 17 pence a minute, sometimes less