Best UK mobile phone contract

[Bus429]

I'm currently with BT Mobile with the usual "free" minutes etc. However, I spend a lot of time overseas and use the roaming sparingly but still get ripped off. Accepting the roaming charges as a captilalist fact-of-life, what would be the best - or rather, "least worst" - company/firm to go for? I would rather have pay-as-I-go but roaming is not available (or is it?)

[IO540]

There isn't going to be a simple answer to this. We all know that if you are a light user then you should be on PAYG, and a heavy user should be on contract. In between the two, there is little to choose between the various networks.

You can roam on PAYG, but not as widely as on contract. The one exception is Virgin (who use T-Mobile) who offer a direct debit option on their PAYG package and that gives you close to a "contract" coverage.

The way to avoid roaming charges is to purchase a local SIM card. Then you can also receive calls from the UK without being charged for the incoming call (although this type of charging is supposedly going to come to and end - to much disgust of the networks who make a huge amount of money out of it).

For best coverage on PAYG, UK and abroad, Vodafone is probably the one. Virgin (on DD) might be better but they block a load of ports on GPRS which may or may not bother you.

Voda also offers fax (in and out); Virgin offers fax out, and few if any other PAYG networks offer fax at all.

[spannersatcx]

I believe I heard the other day that O2 have lowered/cancelled the charges incurred whilst roaming, and the 1st to do so.

[Daysleeper]

I believe I heard the other day that O2 have lowered/cancelled the charges incurred whilst roaming, and the 1st to do so.

Not quite. In typical rip off Britain way its only in Spain which is home to the new owners of O2 - Telefonica. It will be extended.....in due course

Spanish customers of telefonica (movistar) get the deal anywhere in Europe immediately.

How it works ---- you pay £5 a month extra and don't get charged for incoming calls - in Spain.

On my "Virgin" PAYG that would be 16 minutes of incoming calls a month, in Spain , every month.

Not really worth changing untill its avaliable all across Europe.

more from the bbc (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6065160.stm)

Personallly I say stuff the lot of them and use Skype. Cut my mobile roaming bills by 70%. If only I could do something about my SMS usage, the profit on texts must be astronomical.

[IO540]

The point here is that as soon as your usage becomes significant in any one department, there is a solution to it already.

If you spend a few months each year in BongoBongoLand, you buy a local SIM. I am sure every Brit with more than half a brain, living in Spain (OK perhaps not too many of those ;) ) is already doing just that, so the drop in roaming charges for Spain will make little difference.

If you use a lot of GPRS data, in the UK, you buy a Voda badged GPRS card whose SIM card will be set up for £3.06/MB UK and £9+ abroad.

If you use a lot of GPRS data, abroad, you buy a GPRS card and stick in a Virgin SIM which is billed at £5/MB UK and abroad.

If you send thousands of texts you can get a package for that.

Heavy users have loads of contract options.

If you are often in range of wifi then you can use Skype, etc.

Etc.

We will never see an all-round cheap solution to everything in GSM because there is no way, ever, that the mobile companies are suddenly going to walk away from the countless billions they make.

[Gertrude the Wombat]

We will never see an all-round cheap solution to everything in GSM because there is no way, ever, that the mobile companies are suddenly going to walk away from the countless billions they make.
And you wouldn't want them to, would you.

Where does all that profit end up??

Your pension fund.

[Bus429]

I have local sims for Finland, Germany and Belgium but I visit other countries for short periods; can't really have a local sim for all of them.:ugh:

[Daysleeper]

The other problem with local sims is no one knows your number! OK you can swap sims in and out to make outgoing calls but its a total faf. Its OK if you live in Spain or go there for holidays a couple of times a year but I've changed country 4 times in the last 5 days.

[Bus429]

Daysleeper,
Strongly suspect you fly yellow/red or white/red freighters.

[potkettleblack]

Dual sim card holders can help to a degree. Only problem I have come across is that certain phones just don't have sufficient room in between the cover and battery to take the holder and the cards so a larger battery cover may be required. All can be gotten on ebay for a couple of quid. Changing countries as often as Daysleeper though really necessitates having different handsets if you want the local sim card option.

[IO540]

True about losing one's number, but you can redirect your home number to your (Spanish, etc) mobile.

There are actually other SIMs. There is an Italian product called a WIND SIM which gives you very cheap GPRS and very wide roaming. It's a bit hard to get without having to go to Italy, but once you have it regged you can use it anywhere.

Once I found a website (can't find the URL right now) selling a SIM card for just about every country in the world, and the key thing was that you didn't have to go there to initially register it.

[airborne_artist]

If you are moving around that fast you should soon be thinking of VoIP using WiFi - which will give you one number, voicemail etc. and some really cheap calling prices. Handsets are coming in quite fast now, eg this (http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/10/13/review_netgear_sph101/) from Netgear. Nokia's E-series phones also support WiFi and can be used with VoIP.

I went to the GSM forum and exhibition in Barcelona in Feb, and the mobile operators are sh!tting themselves that they will lose almost all their roaming revenue.

[potkettleblack]

You really wouldn't want to be a mobile operator at the moment. Firstly the headache of trying to get back all those billions you paid at auction for nought. Secondly, your customers are shedding their contracts and realising they can get better deals on PAYG. Thirdly, the take up of 3G and data contracts is pretty poor as people would happily use the bosses pc at work thank you very much. Then to boot we have wifi hot spots popping up around the world, many are now free and VOIP is taking off in a big way.

Mind you it can't looking all that great for fixed line operators either. When people wake up to VOIP or the various cut price long distance providers that are around then poor old BT will suffer even more.

[Saab Dastard]

Ah,

But there are already devices on the market that can invisibly add packets to a voice stream over the internet, thereby making it undecipherable, and then strip them out at the far end. So the operators providing voice and data can effectively prevent voice traffic over their data network.

Unless of course you pay a higher data rate - which won't work out too much cheaper than voice rates, and VoIP will still be messier to setup and use (with lesser coverage) than a standard voice call.

I don't think that the big telcos are going to lose out too much with VoIP - in terms of their backbone networks it's all just digital anyway. It becomes a marketing / billing issue instead.

SD

[IO540]

I think wifi is way overhyped (as taking over from GSM). OK, I am not what I would call a frequent business traveller, but I have travelled around Europe, both as a private pilot and more conventionally, and more often than not the options I have are one or more of

1. no wifi connection at all

2. wifi connection but you have to purchase a time block, and the minimum purchase unit is a day/week/month and the credit card billing is repeated until I tell them to stop billing, which is a really great way to get ripped off

2b. as above but the minimum charging quantum is say Euro 10, which is a few MB on GPRS, but I just want to check/send a few little emails...

3. wifi connection with a password but the supplied pwd doesn't work, despite me trying it as 64-bit wep, 128-bit wep, wpa-psk (in both ascii and hex modes) and wpa2 (likewise), and none of the dumb hotel staff know anything about it

4. the wifi connection works but some ports are blocked

5. the wifi is in an internet cafe which is so full of fag smoke that I need to chuck my clothes in the wash when I get back (not useful if on holiday)

6. the upload bandwidth is throttled to a few kbytes/second (the common T-Mobile Starbucks-type network likes doing that) which is OK until you want to upload some pictures / web updates...

Etc.

I have had some great exceptions to the above; one tiny hotel in Italy had free ethernet with megabits/sec speeds both up and down, and one flying school in Arizona likewise (though I had to beg for it). And occassionally you can pick up "somebody's" signal sitting outside a cafe. But this is rare and getting more rare as every business spots the business opportunity in making money out of it.

I am certain that if you have a PDA (less conspicuous than a laptop ;) ) with Netstumbler on it, and take a walk away from the business areas of a city, into the residential areas, you will pick up as many wide open access points as I can right here where I live (dozens within a short walk) but then do you want to be doing that, with your laptop, looking like some perv in a trenchcoat and a bag of sweeties, trying to download some dodgy videos? ;)

That's why I use GPRS.... so much less hassle. On Vodafone PAYG, you get no blocked ports. I use a Sierra 750 PCMCIA card (off Ebay) which does GSM, GPRS, GSM fax, SMS, and works everywhere incl the USA.

As a private pilot, any hassle at all on the internet access front is just not worth while. You've got to be able to get weather, file the flight plan, etc.

For the big transfers, I take the laptop to an internet cafe whey they allow an ethernet connection.... even then i find blocked ports are routine.

Skype is great but only when you can get a permanent free connection. If you want to use it as a normal telephone in a hotel, you've got to buy 24/7 access and that's usually not cheap. It will cost you more than just using your mobile phone and roaming.

So I can see the GSM networks not being too bothered. Sure, dedicated gadget anoraks can always beat the system to a degree, but your average Joe Bloggs will never be bothered.

Business travellers are heavily subsidised by their employers but again if the usage gets really high the company will do something about it (like sorting out a local SIM card, and setting up call redirection to the mobile # via an extension in the company's switchboard, so phone calls to the said person are transparent).

[Saab Dastard]

I agree pretty much with IP540 on this one.

I'm running a project for a corporate client at the moment where VoIP softphone software (and hand / headsets) is being distributed to laptops, so that the corporate users can connect to the the Corporate LAN over a VPN and then use the softphone to plug straight into the Corporate PBX. Instant free internal calls plus least-cost routing and local breakout. Great savings, everyone happy.

BUT it is only practical to use this from home / client site, where one is going to be sitting in the same place most of the time.

For everything else - the mobile phone is just so much quicker and easier - even then a wifi PDA, just as IO says above.

Yes, I can (and have) set up a VPN connection using a wifi PDA and made calls using a softphone client - but it takes far longer than just using the damn thing as a mobile phone! Plus - it only works for outbound calls.

It's also possible to use 3G in the same way - but the 3G usage rate costs more than just making the call over the mobile. Plus the data rate is barely adequate for voice.

Maybe when HSPDA arrives and usage costs are driven down it may be feasible - but then, the distinction between a voice call over a digital mobile cellular network and a VoIP call over a 3G cellular network becomes pretty blurred!

SD

[IO540]

Yes, I can (and have) set up a VPN connection using a wifi PDA and made calls using a softphone client - but it takes far longer than just using the damn thing as a mobile phone! Plus - it only works for outbound calls.

Skype will sell you an 0208 (or any other national) phone number of incoming calls, but then the receiving device (PDA or laptop) has to be switched on all the time, and the battery technology just isn't there, not by a very long way, to keep a pocket/pc or windoze XP device awake for days.

It's also possible to use 3G in the same way - but the 3G usage rate costs more than just making the call over the mobile. Plus the data rate is barely adequate for voice.

I did wonder about this. Presumably the data is priced to prevent VOIP being cheaper than GSM?

The lousy 3G coverage is another thing. The M25 may be covered but what about France, Spain, Greece, Croatia, etc etc...

On some of the juicy business contracts, say £50/month, you can get say 1GB "free" data. One could do a lot of VOIP within that allowance. Unfortunately the allowance disappears once you go abroad, although there are again special business deals for that.

[ad astra]

You might have a look at this company;
http://www.0044.co.uk/global-sim-card.htm#
The international sim card gives you a Uk number (Isle of Man I think), so that people calling you only have to make a local UK call. And of course there are no charges to receive calls in most, if not all, of Europe as far as I remember. I spent ages looking into this and they seemed the best as some of the 'free to receive calls' sim cards give you a number from some very strange countries indeed which are quite expensive to call from the UK.
Hope this is of some use.

[IO540]

To be a proper anorak :)

http://www.valuesphere.com/intouchsmartcards/sim.html

http://www.valuesphere.com/intouchsmartcards/wind_italy_sim.html

The last one is, IIRC, £1/MB GPRS everywhere in Europe. But it's hard to get.