PrePaid Phone Plans in Europe?

[elatrosbear]

My family and I will be traveling in the UK and northern Europe this summer. I am not happy with the answers my current cell phone provider (Verison) gave me, so I am considering a "throwaway" prepaid phone with international service. I just checked with TracFone, and their "international plan" only calls FROM the states To Europe, but is useless IN Europe.

Does anyone have any ideas to give me phone service in Europe? I would want to be able to check rail times, make dinner reservations, that sort of thing, and send/receive calls and messages back home.

[budcann]

My daughter has used "go-sim" for the last few years during her school travel club trips. Calls are inexpensive, coverage seemed great. We bought a "quad band" go phone from AT&T, unlocked it with online vendor, then bought sim card from go-sim.
Many companies sell packages with phone and sim card, just make sure you get Quad band phone, will work virtually world wide. Walmart and Best buy also sell unlocked phones.
Here's a good link to Rick Steves website:
http://www.ricksteves.com/plan/tips/...one-europe.htm

[bottom-dragger]

I've used Telestial.com (also sold on Amazon) to stay connected. Not great rates if you want to be chatty (have people call you) but it worked seamless across Europe w/o having to get a new sim card for each country, and get a new number each time.

Never had any problems connecting. In addition to the overseas number, you also receive a US direct dial number. That tacks on a little bit to the phone rate but my aging parents didn't have to deal with a long/confusing overseas number.

As with other international multi service cards, for long distance you dial the number, the phone will hang up and then dial you back in 10-30 seconds and you are ringing straight through. Local calls that don't require a country code.

I know you know but, your US phone uses different bands than those in Europe, Africa..... be sure you have a GSM World cell phone.

[timeformeandyou]

So I did a little cruise around the Mediterranean Sea and I came across a similar problem. Since I also use a prepaid phone (Cosmote, Romania), I am used to recharge my phone at the convenience store around the corner. But once on ocean, that is kinda hard to do. And since I cannot recharge my phone over my providers website I had to find an alternative way.
So now I was sitting on this beautiful and majestic cruiser and hardly anymore credit left, so I started to look on the internet for some alternatives! There are quite a few out there that provide that service (dont remember most of them) but the one I ended up was fonmoney, since they had the cheapest offer for online top ups AND were the only ones doing it for cosmote.
Im pretty sure there are services like fonmoney out there for every country. so if you find yourself in the same position as me, just go online

Best,

John

[cruising cockroach]

T-Mobile has an European roaming option.