Cell Phone Saga (Part I)

Whaddya gotta do to get a cell phone in this town? Well, quite a lot, it turns out. But at least in our case, it turns out with a happy ending.

Soon after our arrival in Paris, we decided to go about obtaining cell phones for ourselves. We had already planned to do this, as we had become accustomed to our phones living in New York and knowing that "mobiles" were even more ubiquitous here in France. As it turns out, it was going to be a practical solution as well, since at that time we did not have a working land-line phone in our apartment (that's for another blog). So we went down the street from NYU's Paris digs to Orange, the mobile telephone company that is monopolistic France Telecom's wireless division. Why the company is called Orange, I have no idea. Now while France Telecom has a virtual stranglehold on land-line phone service in France, they do have some competition in the mobile market. Exactly two other companies, SFR and Bouygues Telecom, round out the Big Three. All three companies have their own storefronts, just like the ones you would see for Sprint PCS or Verizon Wireless in the U.S. And similar to the States, there are independent operators who sell phones and service for several of the different companies. One of them here in Paris is called "The Phone Store" (that's not a translation). Anyway, we went into the Orange store and spoke to a nice young man by the name of Bernard. He explained that we could get cell phones with or without a subscription. The phones without a subscription tend to be quite a bit more money, since you have to pay practically full price for the phone and the SIM chip that goes into the phone only has a certain number of minutes on it. On the upside, once you've used up a SIM chip you can go buy another one at practically any Tabac, which are like little convenience stores that sell cigarettes and among other things, phone cards. But since we were going to be here awhile, we wanted to get the less expensive and more convenient subscription. So we discussed a few of the different phones with Bernard. With a subscription, there are phones to be had (with color screens even!) for less than 10€ (~$10). I should mention here that wireless phone service is set up a little differently here (in France and the rest of Europe) than in the States. You don't get nearly the number of minutes for the same price, but all incoming calls are totally free. I seem to remember years ago that the fledgling cellular industry in the US tried a similar structure but quickly realized that it wouldn't work.

We chose a couple of phones and figured out what plan we wanted, and went with Bernard to set up our accounts. We had assumed that it worked the same way as in the US, where all we needed was a credit card. Well, no.

(to be continued)