Ovivo New Network. 200 minutes 200 Texts Free indefinitely.

T1Cybernetic

Yes you can have as many as you like

NonGeographicalMan

T1Cybernetic wrote: »

Yes you can have as many as you like

Unless that is you make the mistake of taking issue rather too often with the company the matter of the web browsing services not always working reliably because of technical problems with its advert server or of only getting seemingly very slow data speeds when web browsing compared to what one sees of other friends and relatives with Android Smartphones.

If you complain about any of these ongoing problems too loudly too often then you may well find you are suddenly given your marching orders by Ovivo and also told you are now on a banned list where they will not let you have any more SIM cards (other major networks would surely simply not bother banning a customer for life in a fit of wounded pride like this as the customer could always get an unregistered pay as you go SIM card instead from any major high street store).

In my personal experience of 18 months as a customer of Ovivo the calls and texts side of the Ovivo service always works absolutely fine without any issues and as well as it would on a normal Vodafone SIM card but if you also need to use data (as in theory you clearly should do as they reserve the right to terminate the service of any customers who only makes phone calls, sends texts or only uses data in Apps in which adverts cannot be served) then you have to trade off whether it is really worth avoiding paying around £15 per month elsewhere (for which you can these days get unlimited calls, unlimited data and unlimited texts) or alternatively suffer lots of repetitive and frequently served adverts that either slow down your web browsing activities significantly or as a worst case stop them working competely for several days in a row (when the Ovivo Now ad server crashes and your ability to web browse any further is prevented until the Now Ovivo ad server is fixed by the company's very small technically qualified workforce).

Also if the data service doesn't work outside office hours Monday to Saturday or on a Sunday or Bank Holiday then there will be no one available to help you try and get it working again.

Pay As You Go plans with lots of minutes of data with other networks are now getting pretty cheap (Three now have a SIM only plan with 500MB of data, 200 minutes of calls and 5000 texts for £6.90 per month on a 12 month contract). So it really comes down to how many Ovivo commanded handsprings you actually want to have to do each day in order to get a free mobile SIM card rather than have to spend a few quid a month in order to have a Smartphone SIM with one of Ovivo's competitorsm who will give you as many minutes, texts and as much data per month as you need (noting that Ovivo's price for exceeding the free bundled monthly minutes or data allowance is pretty expensive) without having to suffer any annoying repetitive advertisements after every few pages of web browsing.

T1Cybernetic

I have to agree that my Data with Ovivo is shocking most of the time

3G connections are almost non existent and when I can get internet at any speed it sucks badly. Calls and Texts are excellent though, No problems there ever.

Occasionally when the internet works on Ovivo it is a breeze but that has only happened a few times now

itm2

I also had problems with the data service (unable to browse at all due to errors connecting to their ad service), and with MMS messages (unable to send or receive), and I have to say that the Ovivo customer service rep was infuriatingly unhelpful. His solution to not being able to send or receive MMS picture messages was to use email instead. His explanation for the data service connection not working was that my connection was too slow (he recommended I try it from another location!).

He also said that Ovivo didn't like their customer service reps spending too long on each call, and was clearly trying hard to get rid of me without actually addressing my problem.

I suppose you get what you pay for.

colinicky

NonGeographicalMan wrote: »

but if you also need to use data (as in theory you clearly should do as they reserve the right to terminate the service of any customers who only makes phone calls, sends texts or only uses data in Apps in which adverts cannot be served)

Not true according to the email I have from Ovivo support sent regarding using their sim in my non internet phone :-

Hi Colin,

Yes you can still use your device for our service. Instead of the advertisement's being received by when you log on to the internet you will receive them by email instead.

Thanks


****** ***********
OVIVO Customer Services

NonGeographicalMan

colinicky wrote: »

Hi Colin,

Yes you can still use your device for our service. Instead of the advertisement's being received by when you log on to the internet you will receive them by email instead.

Thanks


****** ***********
OVIVO Customer Services

When they started up their Offers ads by email (many months after I first had my SIM card with them) I got them without fail at the same intervals every few days regardless of whether or not I used the web browsing service on my Ovivo mobile that week. So the unwanted ad spam in your email Inbox is simply another cross to bear of using the "free" service and not related to whether you web browse or not.

I only managed to stop the email advert spam by adding the sending email address at Ovivo to my Blacklisted addresses with the Ironport email spam filtering service that Plusnet provides. Even then the ads still on kept getting through spam filtering for several more weeks but then stopped arriving forever. So it seems that Plusnet must have had an issue updating the database of email addresses blacklisted by customers with Ironport for a few weeks.

To be honest I'm not that sorry its all come to and end with Ovivo as Dariush (Zand, the CEO) repeatedly ignored my suggestions that they let customers pay extra if they had a month or months where they needed to use a lot more minutes and/or data but didn't want to be pesetered by adverts. This is because the adverts are bearable if you use web browsing only occasionally but are unbearable if you are using web browsing a lot one day or the faulty advert server blocks your web browsing completely for that day or several days in a row.

Instead they only had the stupid Whale and Shark etc add on packs that you could only buy ahead to take effect from the start of your next billing month (not right now when you had run out of minutes or data and were facing extortionate out of bundle charges) and incredibly those add on packs were also still going to serve you masses of ads despite not being particularly cheap.

I considered several times buying a data only SIM from Ovivo to use in a dongle but I never did because I concluded I simply couldn't possibly bear the frequency with which I would be served up with ads when trying to use the connection in conjunction with a full blown laptop.

In my opinion by not being prepared to offer a paying Bolt On data product without any adverts for use by customers in months when they may have unusually heavy usage (eg summer holidays or half term weeks etc) Ovivo is actually likely to lose a significant part of its customer base in the long run. At the moment it simply seems to expect you to switch to using a SIM card from a different network if you have a week where you need to use a lot of mobile data and don't want to be bothered by annoying regular Click To Continue ad pages with a wait of several seconds before the Click button can be pressed. Of course using another SIM in your Smartphone also implies the need to put your regular Ovivo SIM in another unlocked back up phone to go on getting incoming calls. Which all tends to be quite a bit of hassle.

NonGeographicalMan

itm2 wrote: »

I also had problems with the data service (unable to browse at all due to errors connecting to their ad service), and with MMS messages (unable to send or receive), and I have to say that the Ovivo customer service rep was infuriatingly unhelpful. His solution to not being able to send or receive MMS picture messages was to use email instead. His explanation for the data service connection not working was that my connection was too slow (he recommended I try it from another location!).

I generally found the web browsing service horribly slow, even here at my home only 15 miles south of the M25 where O2 now allege that they have 4G coverage (according to their latest maps).

In fact in the whole time I had my Ovivo SIM I only ever saw the 3G indicator light up once on one day on my Sony Ericsson Xperia Mini Pro Android phone. The rest of the time I had to be content to feel ecstatic if I ever saw the phone show an H symbol and in the main it only usually showed either E (from time to time) or G (most frequently of all and in the vast majority of the UK landmass).

I would experience very occasional odd random sessions when web browsing was actually what I could fall fast or at least as fast as one might have expected from an Android Mobile (one of these was one evening in Bournemouth in early March when I suspect that the local mobile mast actually had plenty of spare capacity as the summer season had not yet started and nor had the clocks gone forwards) but a lot of the time I seemed to be waiting forever to get even a single ad page served. In general web browsing in a browser was usually a lot worse than using data via Apps so I suspect that the slowness was often being caused by processes associated with tracking data used and this then kicking off the Now Ovivo web browsing page.

Of course I hadn't previously used an Android Smartphone on another network so it now remains to be seen how I will get on with the same Android Phone on the O2 Mobile Network as an MVNO customer of Tesco Mobile.

Zebrdee

If Ovivo start with text adverts as well, I get both email and internet adverts at the moment, it'll be time to leave. Reading the posts on here and elsewhere about how keen Ovivo are to terminate your service, makes me nervous. :eek:

From_St_Neots

When I am at work I used to get mostly 2G signal, but a colleague suggested that I change settings that it only logs onto 3G as the phone will lock onto to the stronger of the two given a choice. Since then I have had 3G 100% of the time a work and no speed issues.

I don't mind not having the 2G option as when on 2G data speed is virtually non existent.

NonGeographicalMan

From_St_Neots wrote: »

When I am at work I used to get mostly 2G signal, but a colleague suggested that I change settings that it only logs onto 3G as the phone will lock onto to the stronger of the two given a choice. Since then I have had 3G 100% of the time a work and no speed issues.

My Sony Xperia Mini Pro only lets me select between 2G only and 2G/3G mode. There is no 3G only mode. However in this mode supposedly 3G ought to be used by the phone wherever it is available.

Are we saying that Ovivo forcibly tries to only give customers a 2G connection unless they have a phone that can be set to refuse to connect to the network at all unless the signal offered by the network is 3G???