My wife and I will be in the UK for a ten-day stay. She’s going on business, I’m going as the trailing spouse, and we’re extending the trip beyond the business part to make it a vacation. Because of that, we’re going to be wandering about separately quite a bit of the time, and we need a way to contact each other. We both have Nokia 6061 cell phones but they’re on a USA-based cellphone plan (formerly Cingular, now AT&T) that doesn’t cover either making overseas calls or calling while overseas.
Looking at AT&T’s web site, they have plans that cover calls to and from inside the UK, but we don’t want to change (and probably extend for two years) our current plan just because of that one trip. Looking at Verizon’s web site, Verizon has a loaner plan that would be perfect for our trip, but that loaner plan is only for current Verizon wireless customers.
As far as we can tell, the Nokia 6061 phone is a GSM phone, and the UK has several GSM providers.
What are our realistic options here? Can we rent new cell phones for ten days while we’re in the UK? Can we purchase throw-away cell phones? Can we purchase SIM cards that will work in our Nokia 6061 phones and effectively make them work in the UK while we’re there? Are any of these options cost-effective (let’s think of $200 as our upper price point)?
Making calls to the US and/or receiving calls from the US would be nice, but are not all that important (we’ll have email access that should cover conversations with our friends back home) - it’s basically being able to contact each other during our ten-day trip that we’re trying to cover.
Your phones can use the GSM frequency 1800 so they should roam in the UK. When travelling outside of your home network you can use any network supported which means that your phones and phonenumbers will work in the UK.
Receving or making calls from/to US can be very expensive and if you call your wife your call will be made from UK via US and back to US which costs a lot of money.
I would recommend you to text each other as mean of communication which should be the normal UK network charge. You might want to check this though. I would recommend not to use any data services since it will cost a ton.
As the majority of your calls will be within the UK, it would make sense to buy a cheap Pay-As-You-Go phone each. I’ve done this - whilst my (UK) phone has international roaming, it’s expensive, so when in Italy I use an italian PAYG to make internal calls.
You can buy these phones in a gazillion high street retailers from dedicated phone shops that deal in all networks, such as Carphone Warehouse and Phones4You, retail outlets for the main networks (Orange, Vodaphone, O2, T-Mobile, VirginMobile), and the cheapest deals will probably be in supermarkets such as Tesco, but here’s a web link to give you an idea of prices:
Better check this - some sites refer to US Nokia 6061’s working on GSM850 and GSM1900 while the UK networks are on GSM 900 and GSM1800. If the phones do work in the UK you could just get Pay as You Go SIM cards (available from a host of mobile phone shops) swap them with the existing SIM and away you go. Do rember to check whether the phones are “Unlocked” so they can work with any network.
If you just want the phones to contact each other while in the UK I would think Struan and SanVito’s suggestion is probably the best. As they say, you can by two basic PAYG phones from a supermarket for 10-20 GBP each and probably get a few pounds of airtime thrown in!
The past two times I’ve been in the UK, I’ve brought my GSM Nokia phone (unlocked from the Rogers network up here), and paid 10 pounds for a SIM card and 10pounds worth of air time (ie, buy the air time, the SIM is free). Most recently went with Orange, and was able to roam in France and Italy for a quite reasonable rate. All in, including adding time to the phone once, it ran me 25 pounds and I came back with 10 pounds left on the phone (better to overbuy then be stuck).
MarcusF, you have apparently nailed it. AT&T agrees with you.
I stopped by a local AT&T cellphone store today, and they gave me an 800 number to call about adding International Roaming service to our cellphones. The nice lady who answered the 800 number explained to me that she could add International roaming to both our cell phones in a way that wouldn’t cost us anything except for an actual usage fee (of something like 99 cents / minute); that is, if we didn’t actually use the phones overseas the feature costs us nothing. She said that she would even send us an email describing the process of making calls while overseas.
Than after handling everything else, she checked our cell phones’ capabilities against AT&T’s master list - and Nokia 6061 cell phones don’t work in the UK because of differing GSM frequencies.
Ah, well - I guess we’re purchasing a couple of temporary pay-as-you-go cell phones when we arrive in the UK.
Thanks everyone for all of your helpful suggestions.
One other option that I do is similar to the pay as you go, but IMHO more convenient. I use Mobal (www.mobal.com). You buy a phone with SIM card, they FedEx it to you, and issue a UK phone number. Your calls are accumulated monthly and charged directly to your credit card. No monthly fee, just usage fees. I haven’t used it since I went to France two years ago, no cost while sitting idle. I’m going to take it to Egypt next month. It will work in something like 150 countries. Advantage: You’ll know your phone number before you go. Excellent customer service.
P.S. interesting username, I used Fortran in school in the 70’s and on my first job in 1979. But, please, not forever.
