'Prepay' simcard help please!

[Simon]

My father-in-law and his wife are over from Brazil staying with us for 3 weeks. At the moment their Brazilian mobile tariff doesn't support roaming. They've asked us to setup, at least his wife's phone to use the UK mobile networks when they are out and about.

Her Redmi Note 10 Pro supports dual sim but doesn't support eSim.

There is a possibility we/they will also be going abroad to Europe for a few days in the next week or so.

What's the best solution for them please? Some sort of prepay Sim card that we can put in the second sim card slot? Looking at the settings I can see you can define which sim you use for calls and which for Data.

Not interesting in any sort of rolling contracts, obviously, and they are on my wifi when at home.

This really isn't my area at all! Obviously don't want to be involved in changing numbers etc.

They are WhatsApp users too so don't want to break that!

Thanks for any help here!

[tim]

Burner phone from Tesco

[Simon]

Thanks @tim, but she wants to use her phone with its camera, whatsapp etc. How would a burner help? And wouldn't it be more expensive?

[Gavster]

Probably just get a giffgaff PAYG sim and load it with some credit for data. It's something you can probably pickup at a local corner shop. That's what I did in Italy, I got a local Italian SIM and put €50 of credit on it, then set my UK SIM for calls and texts etc, with the Italian SIM for data. After a little bit of faffing to setup it all worked fine, including WhatsApp etc. I assume the presence of the UK SIM meant WhatsApp was happy to continue as normal.

[Gavster]

Addendeum: If you go for GiffGaff pay as you go sim like this, make sure you buy too much data, because once you use up the allowance included with the SIM, you start paying 10p/MB

https://www.giffgaff.com/sim-only-deals/pay-as-you-go

[Mito Man]

I think there is an option to tick a box on your giffgaff account so once you’re out of data then that’s it.
They do only have a 5gb EU limit though.

[Simon]

Thanks @Gavster and @Mito Man. So maybe Lebara or GiffGaff it looks like?

[Jobbo]

You can get an EE pre-paid data SIM over the counter in Argos or cheaper from Amazon. Data lasts 30 days (some last a year - they cost more so don't go for them if she only needs it for 3 weeks). Is she going to want to use calls or just data? If she uses Whatsapp or Facetime for calls then she can stick to data and won't need to give a different number to people.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/EE-pre-paid-cr ... 09CLHK7L3/

ETA: just noticed that says 'unlimited calls' so will do the calling - but still worth using Whatsapp or whatever instead because friends from home aren't going to want to make international calls.

[MikeHunt]

rwg mobile seem to be cheap as chips.

[Simon]

Wow, £15 for 50GB. Perfect. Thanks both.

[Simon]

Just to wrap this up - I got 2 of the EE £15 50GB cards - both arrived this morning. And after some confusion around whether they needed to be topped up with a supplied voucher code (as some in the reviews had said) they then started working after making a dummy call to 150. Texting 'balance' to 150 showed the full 50GB balance.

So thanks all and @Jobbo for pointing these out to me!