need service in France but English language support
 

My daugther is going to spend 4 weeks in nice. I'd like to set her up with a prepaid GSM service in France. But, the service has to have english language support -- both operators and phone menu. I'd appreciate any suggestions.

Hal

Phone menu is no problem...most phones I know of have a way of setting the menus on the phone to English no matter the sim card...

Support is another matter....when I first got my French sim (Orange FR) you were able to set some of the voice menus to English but at some point that ability has been taken away...the French you know are very touchy about language and consider anybody not fluent in French to be not very whatever (fill in whatever word you want)...don't know about SFR...in most countries I have prepaid sims in, the voice menus can be set to English (Vodafone IE, Vodafone UK, Vodafone DE, Vodafone NL, Vodafone IT...) no surprise about the first two and the rest seem to have something in common but I can't figure what.

Okay. English voice menus would be sufficient. What about Vodafone France?


Hal

Write a letter to Vivendi, politely suggesting that the glorified shell company sell its 56% share of SFR to Vodafone. Then there will be a Vodafone France.

In case you don't find a French prepaid with English voice prompts here is the guide to mobicarte (see other thread).
http://sites.orange.fr/ge/content/pd...e_06_07_06.pdf (PDF)

Of the 56 pages one, (p45) is in English. But it's enough to get it working.

I'm not recommending mobicarte - it's just the only one I've looked at in any detail. The card and the credits are widely available - certainly, I should think, in somewhere like Nice. As said elsewhere, your daughter will need a French address - such as a hotel.

If she needs to activate an option, which usually needs a call to the helpdesk, I suggest she gets a French-speaker to do it for her.

Other SIMs may have better rates to the US or whatever you need.

Dave

You would probably not want to use Orange FR (mobilcarte) to call the USA...what you do is get a calling card with a local dialing number...I use bizon...it used to be 2¢/minute to call the USA. It has a local Paris number so you ring that number and pay the inflated (French prepaid rates are among the highest in the world but they do have package that reduce them somewhat) anyway you call the local French number and use the ld card to call the USA.

Problem is that while Orange FR has not prevented calls to the bizon number, they have a tone that keeps going off that is a bit distracting (I hear the tone, don't know if the callee does). As a general rule, this is usually the way you deal with calls to the USA from European local prepaids; the notable exceptions I know of are in the UK where there are packages (Mobile World, Orange) that allow calls to the USA for 5p/minute while T Mobile UK has a plan that will cut this to 4p/minute.

On another note although it is not necessary because of the rates noted above, Orange UK does not allow calls to go through to the bizon UK number.

Ah yes competition when prices are obnoxeously high can be a wonderful thing but of course those who have these high prices do everything in their power to keep people from taking advantage of lower prices when they can. What a wonderful world.