I presently have Verizon for my mobile phone service and Vonage for my landline service. I am trying to decide whether to keep Verizon and just purchase a sim card upon my arrival to London in Nov., or just cancel the service and get a new service there. Does anyone know how cost effective it would be to just change sim cards? Also, Vonage offers unlimited long distance (includes London) and it is conected to high speed internet so I can bring the modem with me, connect it and the $29.99 per month cost would remain the same...according to Vonage. Has anyone had any experience with this? Would it be more cost effective to secure a landline service there? Please advise...Thanks
I think you are missing the point about how the service works here in Europe.
First of all Verizon does not exist here, so forget about it.
As for your handset, if you want to use it once you are here you need to unlock it first, otherwise any other SIMs will not work with your phone.
You will not manage to avoid for long SIM cards thrown at your for small change, then you can buy a used Handset on Ebay for precious little and be ready to go. Although the Pay as you Go calls are more expensive, you may need to use them until you can get a monthly contract which will include all kind of goodies (I pay £15/month for a reasonable amount of texts and calls plus £0.30 for each day I use Internet).
There are many companies doing cheap international calls (the best one is Skype, it costs me peanuts to call back home to Mexico) and there are many options to get broadband to your home, so I would not even think about moving any services to the UK, it is completely unnecessary and your current provider may be banking in your lack of knowledge of the local UK market to give you a bad deal (you could have all your digital needs covered for £25 or £30 a month).