My first task upon arriving in London was to buy an inexpensive mobile phone*. For some minor reason I cannot remember, I chose Vodaphone as my provider. I also choose to do a pay-as-you-go option for reasons I’ll explain in a bit. Remember, I only thing I knew for sure was that we could have been headed back home within nine months, maybe even sooner (the economy was tanking at this time and there were no guarantees for any one’s job). I didn’t want to throw a lot of cash at a really cool phone.

WHO TO GO WITH

• Vodaphone Vodaphone is one of the major mobile phone providers in Europe. I bought my 35-pound pay-as-you-go phone from them when I first moved to London. It was a very basic phone and the network service was excellent. I didn’t have any problems with dropped calls or poor reception (which I’ve still never had a problem with; I’m guessing it’s because it’s a relatively small country to cover). My husband’s work Blackberry was serviced through Vodaphone.
• O2 O2 is the service I use currently as they were the original network that had the iPhone in the UK. Excellent reception and customer service (when I need it). I do receive some annoying texts, duplicates sometimes, every once in a while, even when I text back to opt out. Vodaphone now also carries the iPhone and my husband has his contract through them. We can’t notice much difference between call quality or speed, although there was one day where we both tried to load the map application and his was much slower than mine. May be related to the network?; I’m not sure. But his contract was slightly less expensive than mine with O2.
• Orange I don’t have experience with Orange so you will want to do some research when you’re shopping around.
• T-Mobile This is the same T-Mobile we have in the states.

WHERE TO BUY

You can go into any of the above mentioned retail locations for these carriers to purchase a phone. You can also go to a phone dealer such as Carphone Warehouse or Phones4u. I purchased my iPhone at Carphone Warehouse because the O2 store a few doors down was too busy. I kind of wish I avoided Carphone Warehouse because the customer service wasn’t great (the clerk tried to pass off an opened display iPhone as new!). I also receive unsolicited calls from their insurance salespeople on my phone, and get loads of spammy texts now and then. They seem to come in waves. That said, dealers like this will usually house all the carriers in one spot making for easy comparison shopping, and they may have deals the carriers don’t.

CONTRACT VERSUS PAY-AS-YOU-GO

Unless you had a UK bank account before, you won’t have a credit history when you arrive (this is not the same as bad credit, it is simply no credit). This will make it difficult if you want to get a phone on a contract and make monthly payments. This is one of the reasons why I opted for pay-as-you-go. If I wanted a contract, I either would have been refused or I would have had to pay a deposit, usually the full retail price of the phone.

It was close to two years later that I went in to get an iPhone and signed a contract for pay monthly service. I still had to pay a partial deposit. This was after two years of having had a bank account in the UK. The partial deposit was 150 pounds (phone was approx. 300 pounds) although as soon as I started receiving monthly statements, I saw that O2 was using that deposit as credit towards each bill, so I actually had a credit for 150 pounds. I honestly don’t know how that worked out–either the Carphone Warehouse clerk didn’t know what she was doing when she took my deposit (she said I would get my money back “at the end”), or this is just standard practice by O2 for a new contract to take a deposit and give it back once they’ve confirmed credit-worthiness. Either way, if you find yourself paying a deposit and signing a contract, be completely confident that you know where the money is kept and how you are meant to get it back.

*You will find soon enough that you stop calling it a “cell phone” and start calling it a “mobile”. People here will know what you mean when you say cell phone, but you’ll never hear anyone other than another American calling it that. Also note that it’s not pronounced “mobile” as in “mobile home” but as in the type of “mobile” that hangs over a baby’s crib.