roaming

bandraoi

Right lads I've recently purchased a phone from O2/Car Phone Warehouse
£35 a month at half price for 14 months and it has cheaper calls to foreign numbers built in.

I chose it for that because I like to be able to ring my friends in Ireland without paying extra.

Now they want £150 to enable it.
There is no way I'm giving them an interest free loan of £150 to let me ring abroad.

Has anyone ever succeeded in getting it reduced, I could probably go with £50 or something.

redux

Roaming means when you are abroad yourself, not the ability to phone someone in another country. Do you just mean you want to call them from here, or are you sometimes actually travelling to there as well?

When at home, for calling landlines there, you could look in the MSE Callchecker and use any of the 0844 numbers from your inclusive minutes. And you could use PlanetTalkFree's 08700360011 number to call Irish mobiles daytime weekdays.

For either of these, you dial the access number, then the destination, but don't press Send after the second number. Or even without callthrough numbers, with O2's ITS which you have calls to Ireland are 14p/min, which isn't terrible

If you are travelling there ...... last year O2 launched My Europe with 35p incoming and outgoing calls. There is also an Ireland roaming option which I haven't studied but details are on their website. Very recently they started My Europe Extra, which for a £10 a month fee, single or renewable, means incoming calls are free, outgoing 25p a minute, in 31 countries in Europe, to UK and those countries.

I would suggest to them that as they have brought out all these excellent offers in the last year, this is a big part of what attracted you, and now that calls are much better value, surely calling for this deposit against lower charges is rather archaic and no longer necessary, and would they please review this. Don't bother explaining the callthrough numbers though.

bandraoi

The ITS calls to Ireland for 14p/min is the reason I bought the phone, which I told them when I bought the phone. It's and 18 month £35/month half back for 14 months contract. Because it's £35 you get ITS Free with it.

Except now that I have the phone, they tell me that the they won't allow me to call internationally until I pay the £150 as a deposit, which is a bloody rip off.

What I really want to know is has anyone ever successfully got them to waiver this deposit and what did you say to get them to do it? The phone has a £100 limit to spending on it too.

Redux - thanks for that, didn't know the lower charges were that recent, will try that angle.

redux

No, the ITS isn't recent, but that second roaming deal is about a week old.

I can't see how they can ask for a deposit against 1000 minutes of calls. It's not like roaming when it was 86 or 94 pence a minute for incoming and outgoing calls.

A year ago I started a new contract and was asked a £100 deposit against roaming. I called the dealer and asked them to point out to O2 that I already had a contract with it on, with no deposit asked, and that if they insisted I would cancel the contract. They contacted dealer support and sorted it out.

You might try this sort of line with CPW, but I wouldn't be as confident they'll work so hard for you as they do the customer support themselves on some networks.

I'm assuming you intend to call Irish mobiles, but another point you might make to them is that Irish landlines are 5 pence a minute on O2 PAYG with the international option, and MobileWorld also has cheap calls to there.

If they dig in and won't do anything, or anyway if your friends call you as well, look into getting your Irish friends to send you an Irish SIM to stick in another phone.

Both 3 Ireland and Meteor have reasonable roaming deals. 3 Like Home means the same tariff as while in Ireland, free incoming, and outgoing calls are 35c. Meteor has an option you need to apply for, and while roaming on T-mobile UK, free incoming calls, outgoing with 29c connect fee and 20c a minute.

http://www.3ireland.ie/international/gb_prepay.html

http://www.meteor.ie/payg_roaming_uk.html

So you might use O2 and 0844 callthroughs for Irish landlines, and maybe Meteor for calls to Irish mobiles

bandraoi

I have an Irish sim for my Irish phone, I use that when I'm home.
I just want to be able to ring my friends for five minutes here and there, or to ask my Mum a question.
I was sick of paying ridiculous rates on Orange PAYG and I don't particularly want the hassle of having hundreds of numbers to type in and since most of my friends don't have landlines there's not usually a huge saving.

However I think what i'm going to do now, is connect my phone to my laptop and set all my contacts up properly (it'll be much faster to do it this way) so that I have the Planet talk number + my friends mobiles already saved and I can ring them for free with my O2 minutes on weekdays.

Then I can not give them a penny more than the (averaged) £22.50 a month I'm already giving them.

redux

That Planet Talk number seems to be a bit intermittent as to whether it will work; maybe it gets busy or sometimes they remove a destination that is still listed, like German molbiles a few weeks ago. I called another country a couple of hours ago and it said try again later.