How to call from the US to a mobile phone in Europe--please help!

+1 --- etc
or
O11 1 --- etc from a land line

djp is wrong if the question is how does your buddy in Texas call you on your American issued cell phone or text to your cell phone while you are in Europe. The correct answers are:

1. Do they dial just as though the phone were still in the US, ...

Yes

1. What about sending texts to that number? How is that done?

See answer to number 1 above.

Some things are too simple to imagine......

My kids call all the time.......

James is correct. Nothing changes. It is up to Verizon to find you.

Your phone remains, telephonically speaking, in a bubble of US territory.

• People in the US dial you the same as if you were in the US.
• People in the country you are in dial the international access code plus the code for the US, exactly the same as if you were in the US.
• If you always dial numbers with the international prefix '+' and the country code the equipment will not get confused. You do not pay more if you put in the country code unnecessarily.

Logically it has to be that way, if they dialled "the international access number and the country code before dialing the number"
(a) you callers would have to know in which country you were in before calling you - illogical.
(b) they would actually get the corresponding number in the country they dialled.

Thank you thank you!
So simple and so hard to get an answer!

Does Verizon have decent international charges these days? If not you might want to check out TMOBILE and AT&T. TMobile has an excellent plan (what I use) and my partners use ATT&T which is pretty good as well.

I'm going to Europe in three weeks and I'm using the pay as you go method on Verizon. Telephone calls received or sent are $1.79 per minute. Texts received are $.05 and sent are $.50. They have to enable your phone for international calls and when they did mine (during a telephone call) the numbers in my phone's directory magically got a (+1) entered.

Yes, calls from the US will go through as normal. This is great when it's your friends or family, not so great when it is a telemarketer and you have to use your limited international minutes on telling them to leave you alone!

Ray, TMobile and AT&T will cost you half that and you get data service free with TMoblie. But you are on vacation and dont need to be on the phone much anyway..... have a blast.

Mira -- the simple solution is you don't answer just as in the US. If I or my contact list does not recognize the number it doesn't get answered. They only get one shot - and then the number is blocked.

Don't know if this works for every system or phone (I use ATT), but if I am traveling and want to call someone in US, I can find them in my "recent calls" and hit "call back" and my smart phone figures it out for me. I think it works the same in reverse if you call them first to leave a trail in their "recent calls".

Warning! I purchased the international plan from Verizon last year prior to my trip to Paris and Switzerland. I used my phone quite a bit and my bill was maybe $30-$40 higher than normal. I used the same plan when I was in Barcelona in July. My phone barely worked after day 1. I could not make any outgoing calls as they constantly dropped. And I was able to receive maybe 5 incoming calls in 10 days time. I had to communicate via Facebook. I just received my bill for this time period. Imagine my shock to see I owe Verizon $703.00 due to $500 in roaming fees. Not sure how this happened but they will be getting a call from me!!