Please Help......mobile calls France - Australia

crazymum_2

Please could anyone help with this one. My friends little boy has gone to Australia and she is going to France (tomorrow), her mobile is a contract phone on the 3 network, she needs to be able to phone from France to Australia as cheap as possible for long calls - any ideas.
Very appreciative of any help on this one, thankyou.

redux

I hope it's not too late to be useful ...

There won't be a cheap way to do this using 3, as roaming charges will apply.

So getting a French SIM card in an unlocked phone would be better, but even so it's not easy to find cheap calls as their ordinary tariffs are higher than here.

I've just been trying to look at Orange France and SFR websites to find a couple of things I vaguely remember. Orange did have illimité options of a few euros for unlimited calls evenings or weekends, but I'm still looking. SFR had an option of calls that had a fixed charge for calls of up to an hour, but parts of the SFR site are offline at the moment. That would be for used for French landline calls, with a calling card costing a couple of pence a minute more.

It would be cheaper to call from a landline, using either a calling card via a freephone number, or a callback service for from a couple of pence a minute between landlines. Or a callback service could also be used with a French mobile for about 12 pence a minute.

If she's staying with friends rather than a hotel, she could use cheap calls providers like we have here

I realise there isn't much time now, but that's a couple of suggestions to start with, and I'll try to add more a bit later

redux

ok, it was a bit tricky to find the SFR details and I didn't see the Orange ones except on contract,

What I'd suggest is SFR La Carte, their prepaid SIM.

Then the tariff option is €0.30 per call of up to one hour, either weekdays 7h to 17h or weekends 9h to 19h, for a €5 per month (and per option?) fee, as described on page 8 on here (left side of 5 out of 11)

http://www.sfr.fr/media/pdf/offre-sfr/maj-191206/att00003569/tarifs_la-carte.pdf

Option “L’appel = 0,30 € ........... 5€/mois et /option
La semaine de 7h à 17h ou le week-end de 9h à 19h* .... 0,30€/appel
vers SFR et fixes, jusqu’à 1h/appel
* Souscription au 963 (appel gratuit). 1h maximum par appel, au-delà, l'appel sera coupé.

Then use this to call a local (eg Paris, Lille, Lyon) access number of a Bizon calling card for another 2c per minute for Australian landlines - see https://www.masterbell.com

The phone needs unlocking though - Nokias are easiest (most but not the latest); see a pinned thread at the top of the board. Or she could take a spare older phone

crazymum_2

Thankyou very much for your help, very useful. Thankyou