Local Calling ONLY prepaid SIM cards

[OctTheDot]

Hello,

I'm trying to find some information about this topic, but I haven't had any luck searching for answers on the internet. Since people on this forum are more informed than I am, and more familiar with this subject, I was hoping you could help me.

I was wondering if there were prepaid SIM cards in Europe from like Orange, O2, T-Mobile, Vodafone, etc. that were for local calls only. I know they have SIM cards like this in places like Hong Kong, but I was wondering if they had that anywhere else.

Thanks in advance.

[Effendi]

Do you mean prepaid cards which cannot make international calls? What's the sense with it?
If you need to call only locally you can do it with any simcard.

[OctTheDot]

Well, the SIM cards here in Hong Kong that only allow local calling (but international receiving) have lower local rates than "normal" prepaid SIMs. So if someone didn't plan on making too many international calls, but a lot of local calls, this would be more to their liking.

There's always a market for everything.

Thanks for your input, but I'm guessing:

A) You don't know a 100% answer to the original question, or...

B) You're saying no, there isn't that type of SIM card offered in Europe.

Could you or anyone else confirm (preferably in a less condescending manner)?

Thanks in advance

[Effendi]

Surely in Italy nothing similar exists. But I think also in other EU countries it's the same. Now that you explained it to me, I remember there was something similar in Estonia, on EMT operator, but I think it doesn't exist anymore.

There are some operators which don't offer data, but international calls is something really normal, not a "plus". I can even say that most low-cost MVNOs have also low-cost international calls (such as Lebara, Ortel, Lyca...) so it seems here it works almost in the opposite way compared to HK.

[Motel75]

Effendi has yet to be "condescending". You posed a vague question that didn't make a lot of sense, and he asked you what you meant.

There are no SIMs in Europe that only offer local calls. Many years ago, there were some that offered lower rates to a local calling area, or a user-specified area, but these have disappeared, and I don't remember if any of these were prepaid. (One of the functions of CellBroadcast was to display the calling prefixes that were considered local from that location.) But there were never any local-only SIMs.

Furthermore, since all mobile phones have national, non-geographic prefixes, it's hard to see how the effort of crippling the SIM to be marketed and work only in a specific area would be worth it in a market where calls to anywhere in the same country have the same price.

[Effendi]

Originally Posted by Motel75

Many years ago, there were some that offered lower rates to a local calling area, or a user-specified area, but these have disappeared, and I don't remember if any of these were prepaid. (One of the functions of CellBroadcast was to display the calling prefixes that were considered local from that location.) But there were never any local-only SIMs.

They existed in Italy on prepaid. I remember the tariff DOVE by Wind, for example, with which you could choose one Italian province you could call at off peak rates 24h a day. Omnitel (now Vodafone) and TIM also had tariffs which used cell broadcast to offer cheaper rates while on the home cell. They have all disappeared, anyway.