GPRS in France

[Effendi]

Usually it's not a big problem to buy a sim-card in France, but you have to register using a French address if I'm not wrong. Usually a hotel address should be ok...

[joeuser]

any news yet with the frenchie sim? does it work ?

[DaveRo]

First the good news. I confirm that you can subscribe to Option Internet with an orange.fr mobicarte. It involved ringing 722 (not free) and asking. I got an SMS confirming.

I don't think it would normally be a problem except I got this card in the UK from ebay.fr and it's actually registered in someone else's name. This caused a protracted discussion; they wouldn't do it until I could remember that person's name.

Now the bad news. I can't make a GPRS connection. I'm using APN="orange.fr" user="orange" pswd="orange". My PDA makes a PPP connection, authenticates (PAP) OK, gets DNS info - and then gets thown out. The phone (Nokia 6310i) says "subscribe to GPRS service first" or something similar. This suggests to me that I need to subscribe to a data service separately but I can't see how to do that on the orange.fr website. Anyone got any ideas?

I'm back in France next week, and I'll try ringing 722 again: I still have €2 credit from my €10 - having transferred zero bytes so far. But I'm not any more throwing away any more euros on this.

Having subscribed I can see nothing on the orange.fr website to tell me how much of my 10Mb I've got left. As to whether Option Internet automatically renews every month - something the helpdesk said suggested it did but I don't know.

[DaveRo]

I got this working. The APN for mobicarte is 'orange' not 'orange.fr' which is for contract. It works here in the UK anyway. So: APN=Username=Pswd='orange'

I connected an email client and downloaded one email. My phone registered 10K of data (2½ sent, 7½ rec'd)

#123# does not report data allowance remaining.

The orange.fr website now tells me (mon suivi conso) that I have 9.51 Mo of my 10 left. Hmmm. Perhaps it's 'cos I'm roaming - lets hope so or this 10Mb is going to be short lived. Anyway, it does work.

Revenons au France!

Dave

[joeuser]

ok, thanks for the info!

[feklee]

Originally Posted by DaveRo

Having subscribed I can see nothing on the orange.fr website to tell me how much of my 10Mb I've got left. As to whether Option Internet automatically renews every month - something the helpdesk said suggested it did but I don't know.

Can you unsubscribe from the service online? What happens when the 10MB are used up?

Is there no alternative to Orange to get cheap prepaid GPRS? As it looks, Orange is the largest provider in France, and - at least in Germany - the largest provider is often not the cheapest.

BTW, there's also Vodafone WebSessions which can be used in various countries with a Vodafone SIM card. Cost is about 15 EUR/day which can be a good offer, depending on the usage scenario.

[DaveRo]

Originally Posted by feklee

Can you unsubscribe from the service online? What happens when the 10MB are used up?

AFAICS you can neither subscribe nor unsubscribe online - though the orange.fr website is terrible so it might be there somewhere.

When you use up the 10MB it simply swallows the rest of the credit on the card - in my case 4EUR. As I already said, I found no way to find out my data balance online or via messaging.

Option Internet Plus with a cheap subscription (I think there's one at 7EUR/month) might be more practicable if visiting France a lot but I don't plan to do that.

Dave