Best PAYG sim card in France

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DD1 is moving to France for university next week. Which sim card (company and scheme) would French residents recommend? She wants PAYG all inclusive, with the emphasis on at least 500mb internet, preferably more - some talk minutes and texting are good, but less important, as she uses Whatsapp for messaging.

Also, do the same rates apply for this sim card in other EU countries? We live in Germany and recently whenever I travel to other countries I can do roaming at the same rate as at home. That would be very useful.

How do people generally buy PAYG credit in France? Online or in supermarkets etc?

The orange europoe pack is good within europa.
You can buy the sim in orange shops or relay shops ( available in CDG airport & eurostar terminal for instance).
You can buy a "recharge" code for her online as you go

this may help?

Thanks both of you. I'll bear that Orange package in mind. We're going by car and strangely enough won't be arriving in France until the last few kilometres (coming from Germany, not the UK), so it needs to be a sim we can get in most towns.

Laptop, that's a great overview, thanks. My French isn't good enough to know what Google keywords to give in to get the best results.

Oops, have just seen, Laptop, you gave both answers - sorry for my answer assuming you were two different people

Goodness, these packages are twice the price of those in Germany. The best one I can find is one by Orange for 20 euros a month, unlimited voice and text and 600 mb internet. Our current pre-paid is 10 euros for unlimited calls etc and 750 mb. Can see now why French friends complain about the cost of things.

3uk do a SIM card that if you top up by £25 and then convert to add on gives you unlimited data in Europe for 30 days . It's called free to roam .

Thanks Trumpton, but we're not in the UK to start with, and 3UK doesn't operate in this country.

If you can roam with your sim for the same rate could you not do the same for your daughter ? Buy a German one and let her take that ? Could you top it up from your end ?

That's exactly what I'm wondering now, Trumpton. In theory it would work fine, and yes, there's online topping up and she has online baking, so actually she could top it up remotely herself. This is something of a revelation for me - it was only very recently that my German provider (bloody Vodafone) stopped ripping people off for European roaming. It's certainly a strange idea that it's cheaper for her to maintain a non-French SIM.

I just had another thought. Does your "free to roam" deal allow you to hotspot ?
My 3uk SIM card allows me to create a hotspot for my iPad in England( I had 4 friends on it last week !) but not when roaming , I have wifi on my iPad and can generally find somewhere to use it when away but that might be frustrating over a year .

Um, I think it does, but not sure. I know I created a hotspot for my laptop earlier this year in another country, but that was back in the days when blooming Vodaphone still charged extra for roaming, so I'd bought a week-long package.

She won't need the SIM card for her laptop though, as she has wi-fi both in her flat and at the uni. It's just for being round and about, when the world would fall apart without online access apparently.

We'll load up the phone before she goes and then the issue will be sorted for a month or two anyway. I'm still gobsmacked that there's still such a difference in prices - I thought they'd be about the same in France as Germany.

Ah brilliant . I thought that might be the case.

I use a 3 simple in France so do a great proportion of colleagues. Most colleagues work in France but live in UK. Far cheaper than any french simple.

The calais jungle also calls the world courtesy of 3 uk.