Sim Cards in Europe
 

So I'm going to Europe for a couple of weeks for the first half of Sept and would like to pick up a sim card for all the places I'm going to get some data ... I've done some research and was wondering if people with experience on these can give me more pointers ... I'd rather not use roaming and since I don't speak the language for 2/3 of the trip, I'll probably use my phone pretty heavily for maps and also for general net stuff

I'll be using my Galaxy Nexus on the trip and would probably not need more than 500MB per country

Here is the info I got so far, please feel free to correct me or add any info

Italy (Rome, Florence, Venice)
- Looks like Tim.it is the best choice to go with from what I've read
- They have a prepaid sim card that looks like its about 5 Euros for 500MB a week (Maxi TIMxSmartphone)
- I heard that I need to show a passport to get some kind of number to register the sim card and I was thinking I can probably go to a Tim Store either in the airport when I get there or find one to register the sim card

France (Paris)
- I was looking at Orange.fr as a carrier to go with as they have a prepaid system called mobicarte
- I think I also need to register the sim card in France but I'm not entirely sure
- I don't have as much info on this as their website seems to be very buggy
- I heard that they are not very friendly with tethering data to a tablet or another phone

Great Britain (London)
- I was looking at 3UK as a provider, does anyone know how their signal is, I'll probably be mainly in London
- This is probably the easiest place to figure out the sim card since they speak English and looks to have the most options
- 3UK has a pay as you go where you put in 10GBP and get about 500MB of data

I'm open to any suggestions and if you think another provider will give me a better signal and/or better price, please feel free to leave feedback, thanks for the information, really appreciate it

well WIND does have a nice European Roaming plan currently that's free (monthly service fee) until the end of Sept.

its $0.20 a minute and $1/mb for some reason I couldn't get my data to work or TXT home though (I could txt locally) but I think my issue was unique


If you wanted to go with something more local WIND is also available in Europe and iirc they have better rates than tmobile etc

Check out these guys

Lycamobile | Low Cost international calls | Best international SIM card | Free SIMs |
welcome to Lycamobile

got a free Sim from them on the plane they offer nice rates Europe wide

5GBP for 500mb 10GBP for 1GB

When I was in Italy I remember WIND was the cheapest there (although I can't recall by how much)
In England, 3 has pretty shitty reception, but its one of the cheapest providers out there.

Giffgaff is another cheap provider in England (they use O2's network), but they don't have physical stores, they will mail you a SIM card, so if you have friends in London right now you can get them to order the SIM for you.

Lycamobile (as mentioned above) is also quite cheap for England

if your gnex is rooted. use the app called "wifi tether for root users" to tether. it somehows bypasses carriers ability to block your normal tethering on ur phone. u can dl from play store

Thanks for all the info ... I guess I'll do a debrief once I'm back with what I eventually did get and maybe it will help someone else later on ...