Dongle for use in France then Italy

[pcatterall]

We have been visiting France for 2 seasons and have used an Orange 'pay as you go' dongle ( we just went into an orange shop and they set us up with the Dongle0 cost was £30 for a month and the data limits were fine for our limited use.
A downside was having to renew it each month which we could never accomplish on line or over the phone ( too many French terms/tarrifs etc for my basic French) We had to resort to finding an orange shop and getting them to renew it for us.

Question is........... is there a better way to do this? especially as we will be moving from France to Sardinia next year, have the recent changes to international data costs made it worthwhile considering a contract set up here in the UK?

We will travel out to France around May next year and to Sardinia in June but we will also be moving around in our camper, possibly travelling slowly home through Italy and France in July then back out again in September so flexibility is important.

We use the dongle mainly for emails and for sourcing local information weather etc. We can sometimes get wifi but more often than not we have to fall back on the dongle.

Any advice please?

 

[Trident]

http://www.europasim.com/epages/63355149.sf/en_GB/?ObjectPath=/Shops/63355149/Categories

These work everywhere in Europe and give 500mb for 3 Euro per day (when used) or 2 Euro in Italy (as they are basically Italian Vodafone cards)

Can also be bought from http://www.motorhomewifi.com/product/europasim-unlocked-m5350-mifi/

Not available again now until Jan 6th though I believe

 

[pcatterall]

Thanks Trident that's useful. Looks like one is just the sim card (30 euros) and the other a dongle (90 euros) connecting to the laptop or phone via wifi ? could be better in case we want to use different devices?

 

[Trident]

The second pace does just the card too but yes, the unlocked mifi device could be very useful

 

[westhinder]

A downside was having to renew it each month which we could never accomplish on line or over the phone ( too many French terms/tarrifs etc for my basic French) We had to resort to finding an orange shop and getting them to renew it for us.

IIRC from when I had a French pay as you go datacard, the trouble with monthly renewals online or over the phone was that it is simply impossible to pay for it with a foreign credit or debet card, so you were indeed reduced to finding a shop to do it for you. I was hoping this would have been remedied in the meantime, but apparently it hasn't