Getting a SIM card in Belgium

Hey guys!

Today I’m going to talk to you about the topic of getting a SIM card and mobile phone in Belgium, since it’s really important that you do. Whether you’re going on an Erasmus exchange for one semester or two, you’ll want to be able to communicate with people in your destination country as well as with people from your own…

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First of all (and I’m sure most of you know this), when you enter another country your mobile provider sends you a text message telling you what your tariff will be while you’re there - so how much calls, messages, and mobile data will cost you. Make sure you activate roaming before you leave, since if you don’t, you’ll end up unable to make or receive calls full stop.

Some advice: If you’ve got a data package with your provider, deactivate your mobile data before you travel, since if you use WhatsApp in another country for example, you could end up receiving a huge bill…so be careful!

I’m with Orange, and when I arrived in Belgium they sent me the following message:

‘Roaming is switched on: calls to the EU from Belgium 17 cents per minute and dialling charge, receive calls 10 cents per minute, texts 11 cents, mobile data 1. 21 euros for 5MB lasting 24 hours. VAT included. Freephone 112’

From this, you can see more or less how expensive roaming charges are on Orange, though I imagine other companies’ would be very similar.

Top tip: I recommend buying yourself a SIM card, getting yourself a Belgian number and cancelling your old contract from home. I’ll explain this in more depth for you.

What I did was find a mobile phone shop called ‘Base’ (on the High Street in Hasselt, very near to ‘The Phone House’). You can go in and ask for the Base tariff - with this, you’ll get a kind of contract with them, but with the advantages of just having a SIM card. I know, it’s strange (especially for us Spanish, as we don’t do things this way! Hahah).

With the Base tariff, you sign a contract to say you’ll pay 15 euros every month, but the good thing is that you don’t have to hand over your bank account details. Instead, you just go to the shop every month to pay your 15 euros.

What do you get with this tariff?

You get 75 free minutes to national numbers (that is to say, Belgian numbers), unlimited texts, and 1GB of internet!

This seemed more than affordable to me, since in Spain I was paying 25 euros a month with Orange and not getting half the amount they give you on this tariff…it’s fantastic!

Most Erasmus students are looking for a contract like this so that they can organise meet-ups and call people whenever they need to and find out where they are, or use WhatsApp to do the same thing…If the WiFi in your hall of residence is limited, you might run into problems if you don’t have any mobile data (this happens in Studho). It’s best to save your WiFi allowance for using Skype on your computer, trawling through Facebook and for sending emails.

What do I do if I already have a permanent contract in my home country?

I’ll tell you what I did. As I already told you, I have a contract with Orange and it’s a permanent one that I’ve had for almost two years. I rang up one day to ask how much it would cost to cancel the contract, and they said 200 euros…so this option was clearly out of the window!

I realised though that it’s possible to suspend the number, even if you can’t cancel the contract for free. Here’s how:

You can suspend your number (at least with Orange) for a maximum of 90 days per year. This means that during this period of time, it’s as if you don’t have a mobile phone. Why? Because you can’t receive or make calls, nor send texts. The advantage is that during this period of time, you don’t pay anything towards your contract. The disadvantage? (you knew there had to be at least one…hahah. ) The days your contract is suspended for are added to your contract’s duration, meaning that you are stuck with it and paying it for longer afterwards.

Can you suspend your number for less than 90 days?

Yes.

Can you suspend your number for over 90 days?

No.

A trick: You can suspend your number from the middle of September for 90 days until the middle of December, and then suspend it again for another 90 days from January to April, since this counts as a new year (I asked if this was possible and they said yes, hehe. )

You can also register your suspension in advance: ring your service provider’s customer service hotline and tell them which day you would like to suspend the number from and on which day you’ll like it to resume, and this will happen automatically when the date arrives.

This is what I did, and I don’t have a Spanish number anymore; when I go back to Spain and reactivate my old number with Orange, I’ll tell you if it works out okay.; )

Is your phone locked to your network?

If you’re going on an Erasmus exchange, I recommend you get your phone unlocked beforehand, since you’ll need it for getting a Belgian SIM card.

If you forgot to do this though, don’t worry: just look online for how to unlock your mobile phone model. You can pay for this online via PayPal and (this could take some time) you are then sent an email containing instructions for how to unlock your particular model. I think the price probably depends on what kind of phone you have; it cost me 11 euros and I’ve got a Samsung Galaxy S Plus.

There are also shops which unlock mobile phone in Hasselt, but I asked for a quote in one of them and they told me 30 euros…so it was better to do it online!

I hope this information has helped you then, and if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask me!

P. S. Here’s a photo of the Base logo, so that you can look out for one of their shops in your Erasmus city.

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Hey guys! I’m extending this entry because I’ve been using the tariff from Base for a while now and want to tell you about how I’m finding it - what the prices are like, the quality of service, etc.

First, I’m going to talk to you about the prices, since I think this is pretty important. I know I always go on about prices, but I’m a student and need to save as much money as possible!

So, I’ve been spending around 20 euros a month on this contract. I’ve gotten used to it being this amount, but at the start I though it’d be less, since in the shop we were told that it was 15 euros e month…but it’s not. The original tariff is 12 euros a month, but then they put the VAT up. Also, it’s seriously expensive to call or text a non-Belgian number - I usually pay an extra 5 euros a month after having sent no more than 5 texts to non-Belgian numbers, so watch out. The strange thing about these tariffs, or at least what surprised me, is that you can pay for them in advance - that is, it doesn’t have to be at the start of the month like it does in Spain.

In terms of quality, I’d say that it’s quite good. The first reason for this is that this company offers you much better value for money than any Spanish company does. Orange in Spain offered me much less. When you’re getting close to your mobile data limit, you can see what percentage you have left so that you can make sure you don’t go over. The internet has also never decided to stop working, which happened to me quite often in Spain.

Because of this, I’ve got no complaints about the company.

Another thing I like (though again, perhaps this is just me) is that they send your bill to your address in Hasselt, and it’s your responsibility to make sure you go to the shop and pay it. They give you quite a long time to pay it in: almost three weeks. If they see that you haven’t paid, they send you a message reminding you to pay if you don’t want the number to be suspended.

You can also suspend this Belgian number (as I told you I did with my Orange Spanish number) if you go home for Christmas. All you have to do is go to the shop, explain the situation to them and voila - no problems.

One thing to remember is that if you’re going away for a long time (so for about a month), you’ll have to pay the bills you know will need to be paid during the period you’ll be away in advance if you don’t want them to suspend your number.

I hope I’ve been helpful! If you’ve got any questions, just leave me a comment! ;)

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