Cheap Prepaid Mobile Data Plan for Travelling around Europe for 4 Weeks

• 

  spacemansam on 15/05/2015 - 06:54

  +1

  Hey number5, I'm living in London and have been travelling around Europe for almost a year. Its a bit difficult to get a good value data plan that covers all cities. Your best bet is to probably go get a sim card from the UK with a big company like Lebara who have networks all around Europe. Unfortunately you may not be able to get great data connection in all the cities but at least you will get reception yo make calls, even though I know you said you probably won't need that much.

  I'm assuming because you are travelling you will provably be staying in accommodation with WiFi anyway which should get you by and there are so many cafes/public areas with free WiFi around Europe that if you're really desperate you will find a connection. Sorry if that doesn't clarify much

  Enjoy your trip!

  • 

    number5 on 15/05/2015 - 10:45

    Thanks spaceangelz, will look into prepaid sim from Lebara and others providers.

    Yes we have wifi access in all accommodations, I guess we can survive without mobile data in a city or two :)

  • 

    aim54x on 25/05/2015 - 14:32

    Thanks I was doing hte usual trawl for answers before a new starting a thread. Is there any carrier that is better value than the others? My GF and I will be in the UK for a week and we will probably be much more data based than calls.

• 

  bdl on 15/05/2015 - 11:22

  +2

  So, it's about a 20 day trip? You could always look at a BYO month-to-month plan with $5 a day roaming for the days you are going to use it - see http://www.vodafone.com.au/personal/sim-cards/sim-only . Cheapest is $25 but I would just calculate how much data you need (as that is your primary use) and select based on that.
  Any excess included usage you have left over you could "finish up" in Australia if you are away for less than a month.

  You would sign up before you leave for a month, then cancel when you return to Australia. Big advantage of this is that you can have it all set up and going before you go and don't have to track down a SIM card etc after a 20+ hr flight :) …

  I used to use a Orange (now EE) pay as you go (prepaid) UK SIM but it was a real pain to recharge without access to a UK-bank issued credit card. https://giffgaff.com/ is also an option (and can be recharged with Australian credit cards) - see https://giffgaff.com/index/international, I may have a spare sim here, direct message me if you're interested

• 

  rxjb on 15/05/2015 - 11:40

  +1

  check out toggle mobile.

• 

  yacman on 15/05/2015 - 11:45

  +2

  I thought the Woolworths pre-paid sims were meant to be good value for traveling around Europe especially.

  i.e:

  Calls
  Incoming call $0.05 /min
  Calling within Italy $0.26 /min
  Calling to Australia $0.34 /min

  Texts
  Receiving text Free
  Texting within Italy $0.15
  Texting to Australia $0.15

  Data
  Data per MB $0.45

  All data sessions will be charged in 25KB increments.

  I am also aware of Telstra unlimited roaming plans you can get for $150 per month but I think they are country specific.

  • 

    macrocephalic on 15/05/2015 - 14:36

    They're ok for calls* and texts**, but the data charges are terrible.

    *When you make a call it immediately hangs up, you then get a call back from the VOIP system and it connects you to the number that you called. The receiver might not get the your number show on their caller ID. This process takes about 20 seconds.

    **I once sent an SMS to my wife (also using a WW roaming card) and the SMS continued to come through to her every ~5min for hours afterwards.

• 

  Olga on 15/05/2015 - 12:35

  +1

  Hi,

  I used the woolworths prepaid travel sims in Spain and France last year and it worked fine. Used hotel wifi for data mostly, seemed reasonably priced.

• 

  undercut on 15/05/2015 - 13:32

  Also, download Here Maps app before you go, and download the Europe maps. GPS works really well offline, which should save you a heap of data.

  • 

    macrocephalic on 15/05/2015 - 14:42

    I did this, and found that my phone (Zenfone), and my wife's phone (LG G3), took a REALLY long time to get a GPS lock without data enabled on the phone. Driving in Sicily at night we got completely lost before finding a shopping centre with an open wifi that we could use to load gmaps, and since the GPS still hadn't locked on we only a vague idea of where we were going. We got half way from Catania to Messina before the GPS kicked in.