New tariff: £2/month rental, 4p/min , no min call charge

Stuart_W

For users with a rather erratic call pattern, I suppose this tariff could work out useful:

The Phone Co-Op Pay-As-You-Use Option 1
£1.96/month line rental
3.9p/min to landlines
No inclusive minutes
No minimum call charge.

The down side is that it is SIM-only so you need your own handset, which needs to be an unlocked 3G handset, and a 12 month contract applies, but this is only a commitment to £23.52 in line rental.

You do also need to be a member of the Phone Co-op (but this only needs to cost £1, which is a returnable investment, and it currently yields 3% gross interest which probably beats your bank account!).

http://www.thephone.coop/residential/mobile/payasyougo.html

Old_Gold

If they piggyback more than one provider then that could make them a very good service to use as you are more likely to get a good signal overall.

peregrin

From what I could tell from the limited technical information on the website and their providers' websites the "mobile company" is actually a VOIP provider of sorts who has data contracts with the "actual" 3G networks (although it doesn't say which ones - making coverage checking difficult for you and I), so your calls aren't actual GSM calls but routed over the data connection, a bit like Skype. With a good connection you won't notice the difference, but unless the networks are using QOS to prioritise the VOIP traffic it might suffer in times of network congestion etc.

The "virtual" network bills you for the call per minute and they pay the "actual" network per Mb of data transferred based on whatever wholesale agreement they have.

Alternatively the first hop of your call might be GSM - i.e. from the phone to the provider and then it's transferred onto VOIP for the rest, a bit like how the 3 Skypephones work but seems more likely to be purely over the data connection.

It seems like an interesting concept at a good price... if anyone tries it please let us know what the service is like!

:-)

Stuart_W

The Phone Co-Op website states that their Pay-As-You-Use services uses the Gamma Network,

It then also states that the Gamma network uses a combination of 2G and 3G networks in the UK and covers 99.5% of the UK population and that the main networks used are Three and Orange.