I had thought that we’d made a thread here previously detailing some offers for local data sim card for when visiting other countries, but I can’t find it. Perhaps it was a figment of my imagination!
Anyway, I’ve always struggled with data in France. Everything that I found, involved paying by the hour (rather than MB/GB); involved visiting a store (difficult unless there during week days), and presenting ID and often needing a French bank account or credit card.
So to date, I’d never managed to get independent data in France, and was always reliant on hotel or airport wifi etc. There are some multi-national operators such as maxroam, but their data rates, while better than roaming rates, didn’t really offer anything like care free data usage.
Well, recently I came across two companies (virtual operators) that offered pay as you go data sims for France, with data at reasonable rates, charged per MB, and didn’t involve a local bank account/credit card.
Both offer websites in English, and both offer 500MB for 30 days for €5.
Both offer to post the free sim card, but only to a French address.
I read that often the card would arrive to a foreign address, so I tried putting my Irish address into both system.
After about 5 weeks, I got a sim card in the post from Lebara. Because it came via the post, no activation with ID was required (the address was verified by post).
I was in Carcassone last weekend, and tried out the Lebara sim. It worked ok. I had a 3G / HDSPA / H+ connection at various times, but speeds seemed limited. Certainly much slower than I’m used to in Ireland, (at times frustratingly slow) but at least I had a data connection without having to remortgage my home!
Down sides are that any credit loaded is lost after 30-90 days depending on the amount loaded, and the sim card stops working after 90 days of the last chargable call/text.
But it’s the first real ‘local sim’ option that I’ve found for France, and it had the wonderful advantages of being able to set up from home before I leave on a trip, and set up through English.
I thought it worth sharing, in case any of the rest of you find it useful!
By the way, I understand that both of these can be purchased though various tabac stores in France now.
Colm
I stopped bothering about local data sims a couple of years ago.
At least in Germany, the mobile telephone providers offer various packages and deals for short term data usage abroad. Mine for example offers 24h/25MB anywhere in Europe for 1Euro. So whenever I am abroad, I just send a text message which gives me a a day of internet for 1Euro. No worries any more.
This is a good subject – because flying without internet access is almost impossible today – but there are more solutions to it every year.
I did once post here the torturous process for getting a T-Mobile SIM in Croatia. It was so complicated (IMHO deliberately obfuscated, with Croat language menus etc) that only the phone shop could set it up, and they charged a bit for it, but it was still worth it if being there for say a week or more, and you put the SIM into a 3G to wifi modem.
In Greece, it is more or less automatic to buy a 2-5GB data SIM for about €20, which is good for 30 days. The SIM itself dies after 6 months (this was “Wind”; Cosmote do a similar deal). Likewise you put it into a 3G to wifi modem.
Vodafone UK offer what is probably the best package for travelling pilots – yes, untypical for Voda who are known for being the most expensive operator – in the form of their Euro Traveller, which allows your UK basic allowances to be used anywhere in Europe for £3/day. And for short trips this has solved the problem provided you can do all you need with just the phone or you can tether the other device to the phone. Obviously if you are away for a month then you spend £90 and probably more because the 1GB won’t last you a month! So this is for short trips.
As a kind of interesting data point, for people in France, Orange France seems to have a facility whereby they can give you up to two extra SIMs, so you can have one in the phone and the others in say a tablet and a laptop, and they all work off the one contract. I never managed to find out any detail but they seemed to be of the order of €5/month for the extra SIMs (very cheap), but I never found out how much you have to pay on the main contract to get this… If you have to pay say €30/month (a fairly traditional Iphone type contract rate) then it becomes a farce because say Voda UK give you 1000MB/month, plus Euro Traveller on that, for £12/month, and you can get a 1000MB/month data-only SIM for about £9/month. Also the Voda stuff will roam; around £2/25MB/day… I never found out whether the Orange FR SIMs will roam and if so how much it costs. And I bet you need a French address and bank for that too….
I just send a text message which gives me a a day of internet for 1Euro
The problem is that some data devices can’t send texts. An Ipad can’t unless it is jailbroken (then you can use Swirly Messages to do it). And 3G-to-WIFI modems (e.g. the E585 / E586E) have no keypad anyway.
And you can trash 25MB in not many minutes if somebody sends you a big email.
I am a great believer in avoiding WIFI as much as possible. Last weekend, €140/night hotel in Lausanne, no wifi in the room… maybe in the lobby, so you buy drinks? It’s too much hassle. And when I did find it, it was the standard website redirection thing whereby nothing works until you start a web browser, go to some (any) website, it redirects you to its web interface, you have to click on some stuff, ignore some adverts, and only then do you get a usable connection. The days of free wifi are long gone, in the context of having it when you need it (e.g. to check wx, file flight plan etc).
Everything can be solved with a pricey contract. I know 2 people who have or have had a £98+VAT Voda contract 
In Luxemburg I have a “European” contract (for 30 EUR incl VAT) which provides voice and text anywhere in europe and 1.5G national data and 150M european data (and 4G included)
Unfortunately, tethering still does not work (the company is not 2 y.o.)
That solves a lot of data issues although I have not had the opportunity to use this in an aviation context abroad
Usually one can make tethering work if the phone connects to the laptop/tablet over bluetooth.
Very few firms (if any) check the data for stuff like browser agent strings.
Ultimately you can always use a VPN to hide the lot… I have that too but the local client end of it runs only on my laptop. It is terminated on a fast server in the USA. Originally I got this set up to get past Vodafone’s VOIP blocking. I wrote up the details here somewhere.
IOS devices are different. They use a different APN when tethering so they directly tell the network you are doing it 
I should have said…. tethering does not work with the iPhone (apple stuff again )
I should have said…. tethering does not work with the iPhone (apple stuff again )
Works fine for me. iPhone 5 with a Dutch Vodafone contract. The setting to allow tethering or not (called “Personal Hotspot” by Apple) is determined by your phone provider. It may not be enabled on the cheaper contracts. (VF NL explicitly mentions whether tethering is allowed or not on their web pages describing the different contracts.)
One thing to watch out for though. As soon as you enable the Personal Hotspot, this may be picked up by any devices that have previously used it. And this may be considered a Wifi connection by that device. A lot of bulk download apps can be configured to download stuff over Wifi automatically, but not over 3/4G, based on the assumption that Wifi is free or at least a flat rate, whereas 3/4G is billed by the byte.
This happened to me in Belgium. I turned on my Personal Hotspot for my GFs laptop to use. (I think we needed to download and print boarding passes or something like that.) The iPad in my bag picked this up, and started downloading the latest newspaper. This blew through my 25 MB data limit in seconds (4G connection…) and actually cost me about 16 euros in excess MBs before I was able to turn this off. Most expensive newspaper I ever bought – and I didn’t even read it.
oh come on, don’t make me rewrite the full post…
tethering does not work at the moment, but only for iPhones and that with my Luxemburgish operator !
Actually just looked up their website for something else and saw they offer DATA ONLY plans with 10EUR/month 50MB /months in whole Europe.
I also noticed somewhere a 5MB/25EUR contract but no link, so not sure if it is currently available.
One thing to watch out for though. As soon as you enable the Personal Hotspot, this may be picked up by any devices that have previously used it. And this may be considered a Wifi connection by that device.
Indeed.
25MB for a day is quite little these days. Even just for checking out weather on a bit iffy day and filing fight plans could easily blast through that amount. That’s why I prefer to have more independent access.
I was away last weekend, and went through 60 odd MB for 1 & 1/2 days, and that didn’t involve any flying, so no weather checks. Just simple things like checking email, some website when waiting for flights, checking translations etc.
My big fear, as per BackPacker above, is connecting to my pc or iPad. It sees that Windows has released a load of updates, or a new iOS version is available, and they silently download it over the wifi connection (thinking it’s free) and tell you nothing until the 500MB download has completed. Things get even worse with programs such as dropbox on your pc which can easily change a few hundred MB of shared files without you knowing. Of course you can turn most of these off, but miss one, and you could be in trouble!
For those who can easily stay within the limits, then that’s great. I just thought I’d share a ‘discovery’ about data in France, that I’d not managed to find a solution for before. Presumably there are others like me who want to use more data, and struggled to find a solution in France which is pretty common elsewhere. Hopefully this is useful to those people
These telecom firms must be full of University of Upper Warlingham MBA types who spend their whole day working out how to screw each different portion of their customer base
And the following week they do it all over again, differently…
Guess what I found out recently? Voda’s Euro Traveller works only on the “basic” allowance. So if you are on 1GB/month and you buy the 2GB add-on for a month and then go to say Greece, and use up 1.5GB, guess what happens? An even better one is when they give you free “unlimited data” for 3 months (the usual Voda pushy phone salesman chat line when they phone you up each year, ostensibly to offer you a better deal but really for the sole purpose of triggering a fresh 12 month contract – in the UK, the contracts become “rolling contracts” after the 12 months, which the telecomms companies hate because you can leave them without a penalty) and only the first 1GB of that is covered by Euro Traveller! And about 90% of the script monkeys in their call centre don’t know this, either…
IMHO there will never be a good solution which just works everywhere, much below the €40/month area, but that is IMHO an outrageous amount of money.
DATA ONLY plans with 10EUR/month 50MB /months in whole Europe.
The problem is that 50MB is way too little for a month, especially if you have friends bottom-feeding off your phone’s wifi because their Iphone contract has expensive roaming data A bit of bbc.co.uk or similar and 100MB is gone. I regularly went over the 500MB/month I used to have.
This is why Voda’s Euro Traveller is so good. £12/month, plus £3 for each day on which you use the phone abroad, and you get 1000MB/month, tethering, the lot. Unlimited voice and texts too, in the UK and when using ET i.e. calling/texting UK numbers. For another £5/month you get 100 worldwide texts per month and I have that too.
I don’t know if you can run that contract with a non UK bank. Probably not supported by their system.
For those who do voice calls, the best thing is VOIP. Any international call is likely to be €1+/minute (especially to a mobile) and I have had a few €100+ bills last year, calling Europe. Now I can make calls anywhere for about €0.01/minute (€0.07 to mobiles) over DIDlogic VOIP. Obviously, Voda hate it and they block port 5060, and they block the UDP packets if found on another port, and they ensure that the packet delays kill the protocol anyway. Most cellular firms do this now. So VOIP works mostly only over WIFI (hotel/cafe etc). Eventually I got Voda to re-enable it on my account (bizzarely they do it if you ask) but it works only on 3G+ (HSPA; 3 mbits/sec in the UK). If you can set up a VPN from your phone to a terminator somewhere free or very cheap then you can get around these issues, but VPNs on phones can be a real job to get working.
