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Data roaming in France

When travelling to another country, the cost of roaming on your smartphone can be downright insane – you can rack up thousands of dollars in charges in a week without even knowing it, just by having your handset access your email on a timely basis.

For some of us, access to email is important – it even outweighs the need to access voice services. On most trips, I usually carry two phones – my Nokia E71 which is the emergency batphone and my Nokia E75 which I use for email, navigation, facebook and other on-the-go services. Voice communication on the E75 isn’t important – having access to data is and sadly my carrier doesn’t want to cater to users like me (it impacts their bottom line).

On a recent trip to France, I came accross the same issue – do I spend alot of money to be connected or do I find a better way? Thankfully, with a little bit of research, I was able to find a new service provided by S FR which could be workable.

Enter ‘la Clé Internet 3G+ sans engagement’ … or the 3G Internet stick by S FR with no contract requirement.

Obtaining the stick wasn’t without some discouraging interactions with the staff at some stores. (more after the jump)I visited about five stores from S FR to Orange to Bouygues asking for an offer – in most cases, I was turned away and told that you need to be a resident of France to get service. After some additional research on the web, I found the offer and asked for it by name. You’ll need to be really specific – otherwise French retailers are happy to turn your business away.

‘la Clé Internet 3G+’ is a 3G internet stick designed for a laptop. Priced at 69€, the stick includes a SIM card which is activated for data-only transmission. The stick includes 3 hours of surf time which, with my phone set to check mail every 15 minutes, lasted me a day.

Now, it’s absolutely unorthodox to insert the 3G stick’s SIM card into your mobile phone but nonetheless, it works. I don’t recommend that you use anything but a phone which can connect via the ultra-fast 3G networks in Europe, otherwise, you’re likely wasting your money. (So, if your Nokia is a North American model, for example, it will only connect via EDGE which isn’t so fast and being that you’re billed by the minute and not by data, … well, you do the math.)

The following day, after receiving an SMS from the carrier that I had less than 5€ credit on my account, I tried to recharge the stick via the S FR online portal and failed. It appears that S FR is a bit slow when it comes to activating an account on their online portal, even at that, the site doesn’t seem to like foreign credit cards, so ultimately it’s useless.

To recharge the phone, you’ll have to go to an S FR store or find a recharge card specific to the 3G stick. I wasted 35€ by purchasing a voice credit and to my chagrin, it wasn’t useable or refundablle. Once you obtain your recharge code, send the number via SMS to 952. You’ll receive a service message from the carrier stating that your account has been credited.

As a guideline, btw, I used about 30€ a week in data. So for a two week in France, 69€ to start and 60€ in service charges aren’t bad – much better than my previous bill which was about $4000.

Other tips:

• you cannot use the 3G stick’s account to send SMS or to place phone calls
• the 3G stick’s account will receive SMS but usually in a heavily delayed manner (this includes password reset requests on the S FR portal)
• best place to get the proper recharge card for the 3G stick is at the ‘espace S FR’  but I purchased my stick at ‘The Phone House’ after being turned away from ‘espace S FR’ in Paris because they purportedly didn’t have stock

Good luck!