@scirocco - wrong reasoning. With Orange, the full €20 is wasted, unless you actually come to France (and use internet) exactly 6 months after your last recharge. The actual cost (wasted money on keeping the sim alive) is always more than €10 and maximally €20, depending on when you visit France, and how much of your recharge you use up while visiting.

Yes, I was a little inaccurate. The wasted money is €10 for say 10 months inactivity and €20 for 12 months (assuming you only recharge with the minimum).

I guess my point was that with Orange, for people who return to France yearly there may be no need to waste more than €10 each year. For example, last year, I left France in mid August. I recharged the card with €10 to keep it alive in mid February (wasted money). To keep it alive I will need to recharge again in early August. I will recharge with €25. I will start using the credit in early September (taking advantage of two months credit validity). This is not wasted but will be used on calls and internet during September.

So even though I will have been out of the country for 12 months and two weeks it has only cost me €10 in wasted money. True, if I recharged with only €15 I would have needed a second €10 "keep-alive top-up". But €15 is not enough for me for a 3-week visit- it only gets you Internet Max and Mail and leaves nothing for call credit.

Compare that with Le Clerc where all twelve of the €1.50 monthly fees are wasted money. €18.

Sorry to the OP regarding SFR La Carte for hijacking the thread.

Hi guys,

I'm hoping someone here can help me with a question relating to SFR.

Basically I've purchased a SFR 'la carte' sim for a friend of mine who is going to be spending quite a lot of time in France.

I activated it in store and it's working fine. The only issue is that the SIM comes with the voicemail service as default (groovy outgoing message by the way, they play music) however as most people are going to be calling her from overseas, it makes sense to deactivate it to save them money if she doesn't answer.

I tried the usual ##002# short code but got the error to say that SFR don't allow diverts to be cancelled.

Tried looking on the SFR website and found lots of information on how to modify the voicemail service but nothing on de-activating it completely.

Anyone on here got any ideas? If no, I'll have to bit the bullet and attempt a coversation in French with customer care.

SFR's support pages only show how you can make your mailbox not recording voice messages but to announce your unavailability instead: Les options du répondeur Mobile

Dial 123, press 3 for "options" and then 6 to switch to "mode répondeur-enregistreur" (non-recording mode).

Unfortunatley I couldn't find out if callers will still be charged for this announcement or not. Once you find out please report back.

FYI: Cartes prépayées, recharger la carte de téléphone SFR