Virgin Mobile sim only deals

captaindicko

Does any one have one of there Sims,who do they piggy back off and is the coverage good. Reason I ask they seem to do a deal, 1200mins,unlimited texts and and 1gb for £12.

john1

VM piggy back on Orange + T mobile (EE) with auto switching for best signal

hillcats

VM use T-Mobile/Orange signal .
Our daughter has this exact same sim only deal with no problems so far.

diamonds

If you have a 3G mobile that locks to 3G only go ahead, calls on T-Mobile network 2G (Orange roaming is secondary to T-Mobile) will break up as the 2G network is why T-Mobile invested heavy in 3G

My virgin contract on a my iphone defaulted to T-Mobile 2G for poor breaking up calls even on a 3G signal before dialling, manually locking to Orange did not help as 3G speeds were very very poor compared to T-Mobile.

In all my iphone was useless on virgin without having to search & change networks depending on my calls/data usage, Virgin thought that was acceptable !



Iphone even roamed to Orange on 3 even when the Orange base station was allocated no 3 roaming as 3 barred such where 3 THOUGHT they had good coverage (on thier map yes) & why I moved to virgin!

The above issues can also happen on a Windows Phone 7 mobile as you cannot lock down to 3G or 2G, only allow 3G, I've emailed WP7 product development manager @ Microsoft that they should stop following Apple on this & non qwerty keypads for WP7.8 & WP8 operating systems.

It took me 8 months to get out of contract for a service that was unusable (& unused with sim destroyed) but billed for, eventually Virgin credited a few hundred pounds monthly plan build up costs over them 8 months and closed my account.

baby_frogmella

^^^ thanks for that diamonds, was tempted to switch to Virgin sim only & ditch my Vodafone sim only contract for £20.50 (offering same mins/data/texts as Virgin's £12 tariff albeit with unlimited landline calls as well) but i've read many cases of people having issues with 3G internet with a virgin sim in their iphone so i'll stick wih Voda

mazza111

Depends on your area in all honesty. Vodafone, I've found, gets coverage just about everywhere. Virgin does piggyback, and I had no problem with them, until I moved into this house, near the railway

Now signal drops constantly in the house. But voda remains strong(fella's on voda). However, it's not dropped enough to stop me using my phone, usually always got a bit of signal, just means I need to move to the front of the house if I want to use my mobile at home

diamonds

baby_frogmella wrote: »

^^^ thanks for that diamonds, was tempted to switch to Virgin sim only & ditch my Vodafone sim only contract for £20.50 (offering same mins/data/texts as Virgin's £12 tariff albeit with unlimited landline calls as well) but i've read many cases of people having issues with 3G internet with a virgin sim in their iphone so i'll stick wih Voda

Your welcome, the problem is T-Mobile Virgins carrier has a network level setting that even on a 3G phone with full signal to hand calls to 2G to allow 3G capacity to be used for data, this setting is per base station and how busy it is but when you cant make decent quality 2G calls which exactly is why a user has a mobile phone Virgin becomes no good - I should have made that clear in my post above for people ! DOH !!

billa_champion

I got this deal and to be honest I am not too happy with it. The internet connection keeps dropping and it is highly frustrating. I live in London so traditionally I shouldn't have a problem with coverage. The signal bars are always on max but sometimes I'll get no coverage!. I was previously with Tesco and had no such problems. Going to switch away very soon.

buglawton

captaindicko, is your family on Virgin broadband? If so, their Simply 8 tariff is hard to beat even by the likes of GiffGaff - plus 50 mins free Virgin to Virgin calls per month.

diamonds

billa_champion wrote: »

I got this deal and to be honest I am not too happy with it. The internet connection keeps dropping and it is highly frustrating. I live in London so traditionally I shouldn't have a problem with coverage. The signal bars are always on max but sometimes I'll get no coverage!. I was previously with Tesco and had no such problems. Going to switch away very soon.

Is that on 2G, 3G or both ? Can you lock to 3G in your settings on your mobile and see if the same occurs ?

I think even when locked to 3G Virgin tries to force the handset to 2G for calls but if you are locked to 3G the sim/phone/base station have a hissy fit conflict with each other, thus even with a FULL signal you get no coverage to complete the call as I tried lockdown to 3G in another 3G handset, it was 50/50 if the call connected or done nothing with the screen showing "calling" to which after max 10/15 seconds it would connect the call or fail it - I know T-Mobile customers calls get priority over T-Mobile resellers, perhaps all the above cause problems.

Anyhow was enough for me to give up when I'm the one fault diagnosing with virgin technical saying no issues !

I see T-Mobile has £21 Full Monty UNLIMITED 12 month sim plan, perhaps the priority customers might get good lol, as for me T-mobile are fraudsters, never going back there with a account in my name.

OldGreyFox

buglawton wrote: »

captaindicko, is your family on Virgin broadband? If so, their Simply 8 tariff is hard to beat even by the likes of GiffGaff - plus 50 mins free Virgin to Virgin calls per month.

Hard to beat ? http://www.virginmobile.com/vm/genericContent.do?contentId=payasyougo.what.it.costs.shop.sm287#The Simply 8p Tariff


How about these 8p a minute call providers then No need to be a VM Customer.

Tesco Lite http://phone-shop.tesco.com/tesco-mobile/help-and-support/call-charges-payg-litetariff.aspx no free minutes but cheaper texts and 08 calls.

Or Talk Mobile http://www.talkmobile.co.uk/pay_as_you_go_essential.html cheaper texts and half price calls/texts to same network