Roaming Mobile Phone Charges Could Spoil Your World Cup

If you take your UK mobile to Germany you would typically be charged £0.75 pence to receive a call, £0.50 pence to send a text and £1.20 a minute to make a call to a local landline by your current network operator. Compare this to the savings of using a local German prepaid card, where it costs nothing to receive calls or texts, and outgoing calls to local numbers are only £0.27 per minute. Texts to the UK cost just 20p.

David Agar, Managing Director, of GO SIM a provider of local prepaid SIM cards to people travelling abroad, says: “Using a UK mobile phone abroad is very convenient but charges are incredibly expensive. The smart solution is to buy a prepaid card before you travel, which we estimate will reduce your costs by up to 72%. If you don't, you could be paying off a large bill long after your memory of the matches has faded."

GOSIM has a special World Cup package costing £24.99, which includes a German prepaid SIM card, 10 Euros of calls plus a free ringtone and ‘Three Lions’ screensaver.

The SIM cards can be topped up on the www.gosim.com site or at a local shop.

Fans travelling to the World Cup are advised to let their family and friends or other potential callers know they will be abroad and give them their local number, if they use a local SIM card, or only to phone in emergency if they are roaming.

If fans do follow the roaming route and take their own mobiles they need to be aware that the usual terms relating to UK use will not apply. Billing is usually per minute rather than per second, and there are normally no off-peak benefits. Also, there may be a surcharge for calling freephone numbers and customer care lines. Fans should check the cost of calling with their mobile provider before they travel.

All numbers in their address book need to be preceded with the correct international dialling code. For UK numbers it is +44 followed by the national code minus the first ‘0’.