GPRS France

[rrees]

I'm off to France this summer.
Does any one know which if any of the french networks support pay as you go GPRS





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[charles_reed]

All of them:

Orange - France Telecom
SFR - Vodaphone subsidiary
Bouygues

To mention the 3 largest. The first two give extremely comprehensive coverage, but Bouygues is the cheapest.

The SIM card costs about 29€ and top-ups give up to 20% extra for around 60€. You can, of course, buy smaller top-ups with less discount.

French mobile charges are about the same as in the UK - Spain is infinitely cheaper and Portugal cheaper still.

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[colin_jones]

Be careful about this one.

It will be covered in PBO in June or July but - for now - following a couple of days research in Chebourg last week.....
..... Orange Pay as You Go does not support GPRS. You need a contract. GPRS per Mb is quite cheap, but you have to buy a monthly bundle, which might be much more than you use.

Bouygues only suppports data ( inc GPRS ) if you purchase a dedicated phone and a contract.

Vodafone UK works fine, but your fone needs to be able to access SFR. This should be automatic. There is a connection charge of 1 euro every time you log on in France..That need only be once a day if you can leave your equipment runing.

This cost is the basis of an erroneous ( per minute) posting on Liveaboards forum.In UK shop staff appear not to know about it. GPRS in UK is about £7.25 per MB and is £1.00 more expensive in France.

AOL, Clara and Pipex ( there may be others) have local ISP numbers in France and are reasonably cheap if you buy a French SIM ... bur be careful to check that the 'contract' actually supports data. There is still some confusion about Orange in this respect even amongst the managers of French shops.

There are other ways of getting low cost comms to the boat .... these will be discusseed in PBO as above


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[HaraldS]

Will be hard to cover, as this is quite a moving target. I'm always very interested in the latest findings though. This year I'd love to have GPRS at the Algarve, Costa da Luz, Madeira and the Canary Islands.
In Madeira I checked just a few weeks ago and found that none of the four providers was supporting GPRS yet.
In other words the coverage seems suspect. While Skying this winter I had good supply from Switzerland (at least 3 carriers) and Austria (at least two carriers), but when I moved to Carinthia, the southeastern part of Austria, I had none.
So while there are roaming agreements in place, it seems to remain unclear as to where it actually works.
Prices are high, but OK for e-mail. With German Telecom I pay the following when roaming:
42 Euro Cents, per day of using the service. (no matter how often you show up at the same provider during the same day)
Euro 1.29 per 250kb in group 1 (like UK)
Euro 2.15 per 250kb in group 2 (like Spain)
Euro 3.44 per 250kb in group 3 (like Portugal)
at home it is 2.56 Euro per Mb, but could be as low as 1.68 depending on the package. Billing granularity is 1kb.
But as I said, the prices keep changing about every three months.
Pre-Paid cards don't seem to include GPRS, but I might have missed something.
In Portugal I'm currently using a pre-paid card, but never seen GPRS work. The only card I found there that didn't require making a call every once and so often, to keep your charge, was from Vodafone. That's what I'm using currently to monitor my boat. The SMS prices are half of what I pay in Germany.


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[mldpt]

I have just come back from Spain, FRance and Andorra. gprs is supported in Spain and France but not in Andorra. I would warn anybody going to Andorra, not to use a mobile there, I have just had the largest bill ever and all due to the daylight robery of the Andorra phone company be warned they are going to rip you off, France and Spain are OK, I am not sure of the charge per Mb there but on Vodafone GPRS I pay £2.50 Mb which is very cheap when just used for E-Mail and iits reasonably quick I use it with my Nokia 6510 which Vodafone gave me and it makes an ideal modem to connect my laptop to gprs with useing the infrared connection.

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[colin_jones]

Buyers Beware

The Voda charge per Mb for GPRS needs checking.

My understanding is £7.50 per Mb in UK and £8.25 in France.

This is still a cheaper way of getting email than using a pop3 dial-up account.

As said earlier, PBO is researching this ready for a feature in the June issue

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[mldpt]

Hi Colin
Gprs price depends which tarif you are on I am on Vodafone 200 and that puts me onto Vodafone GPRS select the cost is £2.36 Mb and 20Kb the alternative is the Vodafone GPRS starter in which caast the charge is as you say £7.50 Mb as you say its a great way of accessing e-mails and I use it all the time when on the boat and in reach of a mobile signal, I have noticed also that GPRS seems to work with a weaker signal than normal dialup connection.
REgards Mike.

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[charles_reed]

but not as cheap

as using an internet café.

I've done all the sums, regularly on a 6-monthly basis and apart from the convenience factor the mobile has nothing to offer.

I pre-prepare all my e-mails and *.pdf on the laptop before going, transfer to floppy (or if it's big to CD/ROM) and send it off. My usual download/upload time is 10 minutes.
The only problem is the minute attachments that msn and netscape allow you, so I sometimes have to get onto my UK ISDN ISP via an international call.
They give me 100Mb and ISDN2 for £80pa.
They also do a free access (you have to pay the connection charge) allowing you 25Mb, are regularly been rated amongst the top 6 gateways in the UK and have just increased server capacity from 160 to 200 with two 120 channel fibre-optic access to the UK backbone (1 in London & 1 In Birmingham).
If anyone, struggling with the appalling service offered by many ISPs, is interested

If it's a big file I try and choose an ADSL connection - there are quite a lot in France and I'm only paying €32 for 300 mins forfait.

I'll be interested to read the PBO article - it will be a useful benchmark in a rapidly evolving sector.

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[pandroid]

...but I understand that even if you are on the Vodafone £2.50 rate for the UK, the £7.50 rate applies when you are abroad.

I understood that the Orange PAYG account supports data (which none of the others do), however Orange GPRS rates are extortionate, home or abroad

I'm trying to compile a spreadsheet on all this so keep it coming.

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[rrees]

could you send me a copy of your spread sheet please

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