Hungarian sim

Hi Twix85,

Welcome to Expat.com and thank you for your interest to the site !

Please note that i created a new topic with your post on the Budapest forum in order to give more light to your questions, it may in fact help you to receive more concrete responses from the members as well.

Thank you,

Priscilla
Expat.com team

First you don't need an address card to get a prepaid phone/sim card. What you do need is an "address". They need this and this is where they mail paperwork/contract. What you need is just a passport for pay as you go! I had Vodafone pay as you go for two years. I had a problem and I got "customer NO SERVICE" instead of customer service so I dumped my SIM. I got T-Mobile contract but recently Telenor seem to offer a better deal. One word of caution/advise: not sure if this is a Hungaricum (Hungarian stupid take on normalcy) or a European thing but they have numbers here that are color coded i.e Green numbers like your local utility company customer service number. What this means is that you WILL pay to call this number and your paid/earned minutes have nothing to do with this. Sounds ridiculous? Yes if you live in the modern world but hey just another way to make more money here! What stupid post communist blocks don't know don't hurt them---right!

peddington wrote:

What this means is that you WILL pay to call this number and your paid/earned minutes have nothing to do with this. Sounds ridiculous? Yes if you live in the modern world but hey just another way to make more money here! What stupid post communist blocks don't know don't hurt them---right!

Toll free numbers in Hungary start with 80. So toll free numbers exist, but few businesses use them. But also consider that no business is required to use them either, even in the US; their use is more social and traditional than mandatory (just like you have buy a glass of water in most restaurants over continental Europe, and you have to ask for ice --  and if you do that it is a sure give-away you are probably an American).

Meanwhile, most of the planet wonders Why are Americans OK with being charged for _receiving_ SMS/MMS. Doing things differently does not make people "stupid", per se, merely different.

In other words, corporations around the world simply use different tools to fleece the consumer. And each consumer group is willing to put up with being fleeced in a different way.

That does not mean there is not a lot of stupidity in Hungary, in former eastern block countries, in western Europe, in the USA, or on every inch/cm of the globe.

That is, stupidity is a global phenomenon. So one must be aware we are, each of us, simply use to the stupidity of our own society and culture, meanwhile finding it sometimes far too easy to view the stupidity of others through that far less than perfect lens (i.e. cross reference the Dunning-Kruger effect).

However, if one were to say that in Hungary there is a significant lack of good customer service to the quality and degree that a person from Western Europe may be use to and expect --- that is something I would agree and concur with as being, unfortunately, all too accurate.