MSE News: Mobile roaming - New plans to cut cost of using phones in Europe

Richard_T_

I see Vodafone are still at 69/mb - after charging £2.0 for upto 25mb a day on PAYG the 69p/mb if you go over that.

http://www.vodafone.co.uk/shop/pay-as-you-go/travelling-abroad/vodafone-data-traveller/index.htm

Yannis.

I work abroad so I use data 90% of the time abroad.
As O2 reduced the daily package of data from 25MB to 15MB for the price of £1.99
Im switching TODAY to Vodafone which still offers 25MB for £2 daily.
All this on PAYG.

NFH

Yannis. wrote: »

I work abroad so I use data 90% of the time abroad.
As O2 reduced the daily package of data from 25MB to 15MB for the price of £1.99
Im switching TODAY to Vodafone which still offers 25MB for £2 daily.
All this on PAYG.

Are you in the same country every time? If so, why don't you get a local SIM card?

Yannis.

It would be great if I was but I travel around Europe. I tried having multiple simcards (Belgium, France, ) but gets too messy. I tried "worldsim" but again the service was terrible and not considerably cheaper.
After quite a bit of research I concluded that O2 was the best option for me (or Vodafone) but now that O2 decided to lower it to 15 MB's I think Vodafone is the next best.
I posted here because I am interested if anyone has another good suggestion I haven't thought of.

NFH

Yannis. wrote: »

I posted here because I am interested if anyone has another good suggestion I haven't thought of.

It's rumoured that Toggle Mobile will soon have data bundles for non-UK use. The non-data charges are already excellent and you even get a local number which runs in parallel with your main UK number. It's something for you to keep an eye on, but it's not yet suitable.

Yannis.

Looking at it right now, looks quite a good deal,thanks for that!

I will have it in mind, as you said if they release non-UK bundles it will be the ideal for my case.

For now 0.15/MB in Holland for instance would work out as £3.75 for 25 MB. That's not too bad at all.

zagubov

NFH wrote: »

What?! How did you arrive at that? The EEA is 4,944,753 km² but England is only 130,395 km². That makes the EEA 38 times the size of England.

d123 wrote: »

Somehow I don't think zagubov actually knows what the EEA is.

My bad; I meant the non-EU EEA countries - Iceland, Norway, Leichtenstein. Total population about 5 million; that's pretty much EFTA minus Switzerland.
So the UK's twelve times bigger in population.
If you're a member of EFTA you can get EEA membership that way (though Switzerland doesn't bother, although it's the headquarters of EFTA); Not sure the EEA has a HQ or a leader at all.

It's covered in this table and the very handy graphic at the bottom.

As we originally founded the EFTA and then left it I wonder if rejoining it's an easy process or will we be regarded as "dirty stopouts" and grilled about how long we're staying for this time!

bobbyo

zagubov wrote: »

My bad; I meant the non-EU EEA countries - Iceland, Norway, Leichtenstein. Total population about 5 million; that's pretty much EFTA minus Switzerland.
So the UK's twelve times bigger in population.
If you're a member of EFTA you can get EEA membership that way (though Switzerland doesn't bother, although it's the headquarters of EFTA); Not sure the EEA has a HQ or a leader at all.

It's covered in this table and the very handy graphic at the bottom.

As we originally founded the EFTA and then left it I wonder if rejoining it's an easy process or will we be regarded as "dirty stopouts" and grilled about how long we're staying for this time!

Did you mean England as in your first post, or ALL of the UK?
Two totally separate arguements.

redux

Yannis. wrote: »

I work abroad so I use data 90% of the time abroad.
As O2 reduced the daily package of data from 25MB to 15MB for the price of £1.99
Im switching TODAY to Vodafone which still offers 25MB for £2 daily.
All this on PAYG.

Yannis. wrote: »

Looking at it right now, looks quite a good deal,thanks for that!

I will have it in mind, as you said if they release non-UK bundles it will be the ideal for my case.

For now 0.15/MB in Holland for instance would work out as £3.75 for 25 MB. That's not too bad at all.

Especially as you won't necessarily use all the data in a daily flat rate bundle

You can do a lot of browsing for modest data use if you use the Opera Mini browser, which has data compression at their proxy server. Going to the browser settings and turning images off for sites where you don't need them saves even more.

For examples, a page on the mobile version of the BBC website can be a few kilobytes; checking a Gmail account about 15 kB; topping up a prepaid debit card on its website about 30 kB; booking a hotel on a mobile website 30 to 100 kB

Using a Toggle SIM, I could check all the scores at an event I was at for a penny, and call home for 10 minutes for 30p, while hearing friends doing the same telling me what good value it was being charged £3 a day by Vodafone to use their contract allowance abroad.

Yannis.

redux wrote: »

Especially as you won't necessarily use all the data in a daily flat rate bundle

Thanks for the suggestion on Opera , I will try that.

Seems I'm getting through my 25mb quite quickly on my Nexus 4, I guess too many apps are pulling constantly.

I tried using the "Restrict background data" but when you activate it you don't get notifications when people text you on Google talk, or whatsapp..