Buying a mobile phone and sim cards

If you want to avoid roaming, you would buy a SIM card in France and one in Switzerland (and would need an unlocked phone). Depending how long you are staying and how much calling you plan on doing, it may very well be cheaper just to add more credit to your Orange SIM card and pay a little extra to roam while you're in Switzerland versus the cost of a new phone and a new SIM.

The ATT. And T-mobile European roaming plans might be a better solution.

See this thread

I think it really depends on where you plan to call. If you're just wanting to call back to the US and have an internet device, Skype calling works pretty well. I'm not talking about Skype video-to-video computer calls, but rather calls from your internet device--ipad, iPod, smart phone, computer-- to any telephone. You just need a Skype account (free) and then buy some time. You can buy as little as $5 I think, and calls to the US are 2.3 cents per minute regardless of where you call from. All you need is an internet connection on your European end, and wifi is fairly common there these days. If you are using this to call phones other than those in the US, the price is much higher and this option may not be as economical as the cell phone/sim card route.

I found some cheap quad-band, GSM phones on Verizon for under $20. I'm going to buy them and use Lycamobile SIMs in them. My son and I only need to call or text, and only when apart. The SIMs are free (a French friend is kindly lending his home address for them to be sent to him--Lycamobile France won't mail them here), and you can top up for under 10 Euros, I believe (under 5 pounds in UK).

When we get home, I'm going to sell the phones!

Yes, the options confuse. I've been there. There are many phone companies offering SIMs and service in Europe now, and the list of details you should know is at about a dozen - per company. Comparing all these was a nightmare for me, so I eventually settled for lefrenchmobile.

I'm a computer tech, but the subject matter is time-consuming, vast, and ever-changing so there is no practical way that Rick could be expected to give anything but very general advice. The devil is in the details and the specifics are up to you.

Maybe we had complicated needs, and it would be easier for others who just want voice and texting. But we wanted data too. We returned just recently from a 3-week trip to France, Switzerland and Germany using lefrenchmobile on 2 tablets and 2 phones and are happy overall. If I had spent more hours/days analyzing, I suppose I could have squeezed a few dozen more dollars of savings using le barra or free or one of the others (oneSIM?) but the hassle and complication wasn't worth it.

Assuming you have GSM-compatible unlocked phones, you can order SIMs from lefrenchmobile and have them shipped to you in the USA. Then when you land in Europe, you can starting using your phones immediately, usually. We wanted the phones for voice and texting and the tablets for data, so we could use google maps, tripadvisor and yelp to find our way around and locate good restaurants and facilities nearby, check attraction websites, look up train schedules, etc. all without being dependent on wi-fi only.

The pluses for lefrenchmoble were 1) One of the easiest to understand and use websites 2) Reasonable prices, not the lowest but overall a time-saver and less complicated. 3) Works in all the major European countries including Switzerland 4) Pricing plans for France-only or pan-Eurpoean voice and data. 4) Easy to top-up, easy to apply a plan. They even use the lowest-cost plan you applied automatically for you, depending on where you are roaming. 5) English-speaking phone support, although not 24-hour and limited weekend. But I contacted them via text message on their web site and got a reply the next morning.

The times we had problems were not lefrenchmobiles fault, but due to limited to data connections at our locations (narrow streets in Arles, small towns in France, etc.) Voice almost always worked, though.

I haven't been to France in several years, but when I was there, there were shops advertising deblockage (phone unlocking) everywhere, for about €20. So, you could take your current phone and use it in France with Orange, get it unlocked there, and then take it to Switzerland. When your Orange credit runs out, get a Swiss SIM. This way, you have a phone good for all your future trips to Europe as well.

If swapping SIMs when you enter a new country is OK for you (and then taking the time to test, configure, and troubleshoot each new SIM as needed) then you can save a few bucks. One of the challenges in my search was finding a company that had good roaming rates in all three countries we visited, with Switzerland being the wild card. It seems that Switzerland is not supported as often or is more costly with some of the so-call pan-European SIMs I checked out. Maybe it's because they are on not on the Euro. But lefrenchmobile DID roam in Switzerland with reduced rates. There are a few others that include Switzerland, if you examine their web site for details. I'm not a shill for lefrenchmobile but lefrenchmobile company solved our roaming needs adequately with minimal confusion and good support.

If you only expect to make phone calls (voice-only) then your shopping is easiest. It gets more involved when you want voice, texting, and data (forget streaming, by the way). Data brings in another set of decisions. Then you'll want to factor in the countries you are visiting and does the SIM roam with good rates in all of them? Then you may want to examine the company and its varied plans, their costs, their duration and their plan's longevity. And: How easy is the web site to use? How do you top-up securely? Also consider if the company has English language phone support. Additonal factors may be how many plans can be in your account at a time and do you want a US phone number or local country phone number? Is call-back acceptable?

Confusing? YES! I suspect most people just take a company, any company, and go with it rather than slog though all these decisions. Usually, if your just grab any decent-looking SIM, you will escape most exorbitant roaming fees, but not always get the lowest price or best support. Maybe that's good enough. If so, stop reading here and get your SIM.

IMHO, here's the least time-consuming solution. After landing, go to a kiosk where they sell phones and SIMs - in good English. Tell them your exact needs and make sure what they sell you does all you expect. Hand them your tablets, phones, whatever and have them install the SIMs and TEST that everything is working to your heart's content. Assuming the seller is trustworthy, you should be able to walk away with a working solution. This may not be the cheapest solution, but it can be the quickest and easiest.

I'm am a computer tech and love hacking and testing and troubleshooting - but not while I'm touring, it's a waste of precious travel time. As a poster on tripadvisor pointed out, we sometimes spend a lot of time saving a few dollars on the smaller costs (phone and moblie data service) to the neglect of the larger costs (airline fares, hotel costs, meal costs, efficient itinerarys). My travel hour was worth between 35 to 50 dollars and hour for our recent trip. And we were traveling in a budget-oriented mode, a la Rick Steves. I'm glad I heeded that poster's advice and spent a few dollars more for a SIM that worked in ALL countries we would visit and had an easy to use website and plan selection.

We traveled with 2 "unlocked" GSM phones and two tablets for a total of 4 SIMs to manage. Even with lefrenchmobile, (which I believe is the easiest to understand and use) I spent an extra 2 hours at CDG troubleshooting my wife's so-called "unlocked" phone. After talking to lefrenchmobile's English free phone support (on my phone) they concluded that her phone was not really unlocked (even though it seemed to work with multiple SIMs in the USA). The time and money-saving solution was for her to walk around the airport looking for a true unlocked phone to buy. She spent 25 Euros on a decent cheapie and the lefrenchmoible SIM then worked in it. We were up and running and headed to Montmartre for the rest of the day.

I hope your phone and data experience is trouble-free and you spend more time touring and enjoying the sites!

@Harold, Those shops are gone now. I've been scouring the neighborhoods for one that carries several brands of sims so I can compare, but they are gone. No more Phone House stores. It's all the big names now, Bougyes, Orange, SFR. I'll just load my old SFR phone this year and pay roaming outside France, but next year I'll get the sim Steve from White Plains wrote about or what the previous poster has told us about.

Bets is right about Phone House in France. I was just visiting and they no longer exist in that country. However, you can buy cheap SIM cards at Relay stores or your local tabac. I got a Lebara SIM card for free at a tabac and bought 10 euros of credit. There are also Lycamobile SIM cards available. These two companies have websites in English for each of the countries they service, and they can switch text messages and voice mail prompts to English. They are also a lot cheaper than Orange, SFR or Bouygues -- especially for calls to the US.

I guess it's more complicated that it appears.
"Phone doesn't really mean "phone" anymore. It used to mean voice calls. Now it can mean voice, texting, and data (internet). And many people are using tablets that contain a "phone" SIM card. Do we call that a "phone"?

Because smartphones are just about the norm these days, you can't just say "phone" and be clear about your needs. You have to determine how much texting and data (internet) access you want also - three different types of "phone" use. And tablets are mostly internet based when they take a SIM (although texting does work).

All the European SIM sites break their services and prices into those three categories - voice, text and (MMS) and internet data so you have to make your purchase decision based on that system and your intended use.

Internet data is still a bit of an add-on to some of these companies (IMHO) because their bread and butter is voice, and then some texting. A few don't have data included with some of their plans. Some like lebara only give 2G internet data (last time I checked). If you are an American smart phone user (or tablet user) you may be disappointed with 2G, Edge, and some of the rock-bottom internet data services some of the low-cost vendors offer (that's why it's cheap - it's slow and weak-signaled).

Some say they will just use wi-fi but my travel partner and I found this too limiting - too often rendering live google maps, and location-based services unavailable - a lot of the travel app's features. We wanted to use our "phones" as GPS devices and, for example, look up the nearest good restaurant (using location based services) and get a live route to it with google maps. We needed to check train schedules and weather anywhere, not just when wi-fi was available. So I think many will be finding that internet access via a SIM card or "phone" as a good, inexpensive enhancement to travel.

Europe is mostly 3G, with parts being 4G high-speed. If you want good internet access, I found you need to shop for that specifically, and voice and texting will come with it.

Just my 2 cents.
-Don