[s-cars] Calling European Mobile Phones

[Charlie Smith]

> First,  Marc Glasgow wrote:
>
> One note: the 171 prefix phone number is a cell phone, and calls from
> the US will incur a substantial per-minute surcharge for calling it.


Then, Robin St.Clair wrote:
>
> Why will calling a cell phone in Germany incur a substantial surcharge?
> This is not a given, its down to your long Distance carrier.
>
> You cannot extrapolate from the US telephone experience to Europe,
> these days. In Europe almost everybody has a mobile phone which
> allows them to be contact-able at almost all times, wherever they
> may be. Reception is largely excellent, funnily enough it is only
> when receiving calls from the US that I experience any quality of
> service issues, go figure! As the mobile phone network in Europe
> integrates the SMS system, pagers are redundant. It makes complete
> sense to post a mobile phone number when selling a car in Europe.
>
> In most parts of the world it is possible to switch to the carrier
> which offers the best rates to your target destination on a call by
> call basis, this is very handy (German joke), but don't be surprised
> if there is a lot of compression on a really cheap service.

I frequently call a mobile phone in Germany.  Calls are $0.25/min
to the mobile, and $0.17 to a German land line.  The same is true
with calls to France.  As Robin says, it's dependent on your
service provider.  The rates I cited above are when using my T-Mobile
(Voicestream) cell phone here in the US.  Rates on an AT&T landline
are similar or lower if you have the right international calling plan.

Calls to a mobile are generally more expensive because the mobile user's
incoming calls usually have no airtime charge in Europe, the caller
picks up the callee's airtime charge.

FWIW, when I'm in Europe I usually pick up a prepaid GSM SIM card, that
then gives me a local phone number, and incoming calls don't decrement
the prepaid minutes on the SIM.  Friends in the US can then call at
rates like those above.

Do any of you living in Europe know which providers have prepaid SIMs
that I can recharge while outside the country?  If I'm 10 or 12 months
between visits, the SIMs usually expire and *poof*, there goes the phone
number.  If I could figure how to keep the SIMs valid, I'd have the
phone numbers put on business cards and such.

Let's see ... Audi content?  This works even when I'm traveling
at high speed in an Audi!  So there.

    - Charlie