Report on using Orange Mobicarte in France

[bluespruce]

Hold on one second— I don't mean to single anyone out, but in looking for more information about free incoming calls in this thread, I came across this post by you about a year ago:

Originally Posted by scirocco

Glad you got it working. The Mobicarte tariff sheet is linked below, but basically it's a caller pays system, so you pay nothing for incoming calls, even international. For calls to mobiles or landlines within France it's 0.54 euros per minute according to the tariff sheet. SMS are 0.135 euros each. International calls are much higher of course.

Orange also do deals such as 0.9 euros for 10 minutes in any one day, 10 euros unlimited calls over the weekend and 3 euros unlimited 9pm to midnight. You can see some of these in my picture in post 50 back on page 5 of this thread. You can access these on the #123 menu or on the Orange Portail.

There's absolutely no need to sign up for an Orange account if you don't want to. But it is a bit easier to sit back in the comfort of your home and get up to speed with their deals online than it is in the clunky old #123 phone menu. Depends on your level of reading French too.

I think with your basic RAZR phone as long as you don't open the browser or use any add-on apps like Google Maps you will not use any data. I used to have a RAZRV6 and that was how it worked.

http://boutique.orange.fr/doc/contrat3552.pdf

(Emphasis mine). So have the plans changed (along with the cancellation of Internet Max), or were you mistaken? Are you sure you were charged for receiving incoming int'l calls last week?

I'm mostly interested in being able to contact business and family in the U.S., and I'll be in major cities most of the time, so Lebara's limitations in rural areas doesn't bother me too much. But if I can get free incoming calls even from international numbers, then I might be able to be swayed away from Lebara at this point, as a free incoming call plan + Skype may turn out to be cheaper.