For American penny-pinchers who can meter their phone usage to a tiny sliver of voice and data and supplement with Wi-Fi, FreedomPop offers a pretty amazing deal. If you can snag a compatible phone and SIM card, you can get a small amount of service every month for free, gratis, and nothing. The service is now expanding outside of FreedomLand (he said, with only a trace element of irony) and hopping the pond to the United Kingdom.

FreedomPop will launch its service in the UK starting this summer, and according to this Guardian report, its free tier will offer 200 voice minutes, 200 text messages, and 200MB of data per month. That's considerably less than the free option in the US, which offers 200 minutes, 500 texts, and 500MB of data. FreedomPop will offer low-cost paid options on top of that, though the exact pricing structure is unknown at the moment. Customers may or may not need to pay for a GSM SIM card. The company sells branded phones in the US, but with the thriving market for unlocked handsets in Europe, that may not be necessary. Going over the allotted amounts of your plan will incur penalty charges, just like a conventional carrier plan.

FreedomPop is also planning on offering low-cost national roaming to UK customers. At the moment the company offers its "Jetsetter" plan to US customers with 100MB of free data (and nothing else) in the UK, Spain, and France. FreedomPop users in the UK should be eligible for this service on mainland Europe as well, and the company hopes to expand Jetsetter to 15 European markets by the end of the year.

Source: FreedomPop