T-mobile PAYG broadband - occasional use

fwor

I currently have a 3 mobile dongle on PAYG, which I use when on holiday in the UK. In terms of payments it's ideal, as I just pay a £10 top-up when needed, and it sits in a drawer with no credit on it when not in use.

However, 3's coverage isn't very good, so I'm looking at changing to Orange or T-Mobile.

Neither Orange nor T-Mobile seem to describe whether this would work on their PAYG service, so I phoned Orange. Their response: Yes, you can let your credit expire, but you would have to then buy a new dongle very time you wanted to top up again!

Does anyone know whether T-Mobile has a more rational approach to this? I've scoured their website, and can't seem to find the answer, so no doubt it's buried deep in some well-hidden T&C's...

espresso

You won't get much help by asking the official call centre workers but if you unlock the 3 dongle and use either an Orange or a T-Mob SIM's in it, they charge a max of £2 per day. Virgin charge £0.35 for up to 25MB of data per day, just keep an eye on your usage.

tripled

"(c) You must make a connection action at least once every 180 days. If you do not
your SIM will be disconnected from the network and you will not be able to use the
service at all. You will lose your mobile phone number. Any credit on your account
at the time of such disconnection will be forfeited."

http://support.t-mobile.co.uk/resources/sites/TMOBILE/content/live/DOCUMENTS/0/DO116/en_GB/36014778_PAYG_TandCs_v1_online.pdf

I'm sure most networks have some sort of clause about expiring credit and sims. You might be able to get a new sim, rather than a new dongle. Bear in mind T-Mobile and Orange have merged so ther may be some harmonisation of their T's and C's at some point (if it hasn't happed already).

fwor

Thanks for the advice - it hadn't occurred to me that it would be possible to unlock the 3 dongle - I shall now be googling to find out how.

It's a good result, because I know that the dongle's chipset works under Ubuntu without any faffing about - which would no doubt be needed with a different make/model.

spud17

Anything useful here?

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/1703797