data in France | orange's "Internet Max" (500MB for €9) works also on PCs
 

Hello world,

Having returned from France today, where I used an orange prepaid SIM ("mobicarte"), I wanted to share my experience with you:

Allthough the t&c's of orange state, that the "Internet Max" option (500MB of data for € 9, limited to 30 days) is valid for handset use only, you can use those 500MB from a computer, too. Even EDGE and HSDPA are enabled.

However some ports seem to be blocked.

Anyway the following protocols/ports are definitely opened:
HTTP (port 80 and 8080)
HTTPS (port 443)
FTP (port 21)
SMTP (port 25)
POP3 (port 110)
ICQ (port ?)

So with virtually € 0,018/MB "Internet Max" is a really attractive tariff to get mobile internet during your stay in France.

orange mobicartes are sold at ebay.fr for less than € 10 and credit can be purchased just everywhere throughout the country.

regards,

Inquisitor

It's unlimited.
They just reserve the right to cap your speed if you use more than 500MB.

However prices are high for voice, my advice is to use a callback system like jajah (you have unlimited data anyway to use it), even for national calls.

I use it like this.

it's important to say again that you've to recharge that sim every month, not very cheap

Recharging the mobicarte with less than € 10 extends validity for 1 month, but any recharge of € 10 or more prolongs validity by 6 months.
So keeping an Orange mobicarte permanently active maybe doesn't pay off, if you need it only for a week per year in France.
But even if you include the inital cost for the purchase of an Orange mobicarte (at least at eBay) a month of unlimited data costs € 19 (€ 14 for a SIM including € 5 of credit and shipping + € 5 recharge to have enough credit for the Internet Max option).
In my opinion that's still rather cheap. With my German postpaid O2 SIM I would get 2.1 MB of volume in France for € 19. ;-)

are you sure? here i only read it's necessary to recharge every month

I think we talk at cross purposes.

I was writing about the validity of the SIM card itself, while you obviously mean the validity of credit, which is shorter depending on the amount of recharge:

5€ - 1 week
10€ - 15 days
15€ - 1 month
25€ (+ 5€ bonus) 2 months
35€ (+ 10€ bonus) 3 months
50€ (+ 15€ bonus) 4 months
75€ (+ 25€ bonus) 4 months
100€ (+ 50€ bonus) 5 months

source: http://sites.orange.fr/ge/content/pd..._mobicarte.pdf, page 3

Good, you've the reason, i mean the credit.