PAYG phone/sim for Spain

OldGreyFox

If you have inclusive minutes http://www.dial123.co.uk/ credit dial ,payg service, top up from £5.They allocate you a 020 number that points directly at the target number. 2p a minute to spanish mobile. ( No other charges as such)

SouthUKMan

Grumbler and OldGreyFox. Thank you so much I did not realise calls could be so cheap. You have easily saved me £40 a month. THANK YOU!

Jakg

Going to the Canary Islands (Fuerteventura) for a week next week and I'd like to have the internet on my phone while I'm out there.

With Three who want £0.45/MB, or £5 per day for "unlimited" data but no tethering.

I've seen Tuenti recommended - but I can't seem to find if they also work / their data is valid / they are sold in the Canary Islands.

Best price I've found so far is 1GB for £39.99 here - http://www.dataroam.co.uk/products/spanish-data-sim-card-mifi - but I was hoping for 250-500MB for <£20.

I have an unlocked iPhone 5, but I'd like to tether (ideally) to use my laptop.

Not so worried about calls or texts.

Ideas?

pepdavies

Hotel WiFi not enough? I expect there are plenty of pubs and cafes with WiFi too.

Roger1

pepdavies wrote: »

Hotel WiFi not enough? I expect there are plenty of pubs and cafes with WiFi too.

Is that your experience? Many/most hotels on Fuerteventura ask stupid rates for hotel wi-fi.

PAYG with Toggle may be worth considering - 15p/mb when using a local number (see https://www.togglemobile.co.uk for details).

Buzby

Not when I was there, most of the bars were free - 3UKs £5 deal is great value. No tethering sure, but it's a minor inconvenience.

redux

Unless it's for only a few megabytes (which might be ok using Opera Mini with images turned off), data roaming is likely to work out more expensive than using a local SIM with a bundle of 500 MB or 1 GB for a few euros

Recommendations I've seen before as well as Tuenti are Carrefour, Masmovil, Simyo or Yoigo. I haven't checked recently, but you should be able to find these yourself.

Im_just_careful

I like the Carrefour SIM offer, I bought that on a previous trip to Spain but I don't think there is a big Carrefour in Fuerteventura.


On my last trip I bought a SIM from Lyca in my resort (a small resort in Majorca)


http://www.lycamobile.es/en/specialoffer


That worked well, I just needed a passport to buy it. It wouldn't work in my MiFi but was fine in the phone. The phone doesn't support tethering so I couldn't try that.


See "Data Value Pack" and then Navega 1GB etc.


Take the APN information on a piece of paper (BIG TIP LEARNT THE HARD WAY !)


Settings Name: Lycamobile
APN: data.lycamobile.es
User Name: lmes (the l is a small L)
Password: plus

Im_just_careful

Alternatively, I have a Vodafone SIM which I keep active and take on holiday for the £2 25MB deal in Europe. Not great but saved my bacon more than once !

NFH

pepdavies wrote: »

Hotel WiFi not enough? I expect there are plenty of pubs and cafes with WiFi too.

I don't understand this argument. If wifi is sufficient, then it would be equally sufficient in the UK as well. Given that the OP needs mobile data in the UK, then they obviously need it abroad too. Most people use more data when abroad for maps etc.

Here's my experience of buying a Tuenti SIM card. I went to Barcelona for two nights in January, so I went to Movistar's largest shop in Barcelona at Plaça de Catalunya to buy a SIM card. Before travelling, I had tried to phone the shop at least thirty times but they never answered the phone; I expected a telephone company to be better at using telephones. When I got there, they sent me to the local tourism office, which was oddly located upstairs on the first floor of the Movistar shop. They had sold out of SIM cards and sent me back downstairs. I was then told that the entire shop (despite being the largest in Barcelona) was out of stock of Movistar nano-SIMs and that in any case they refuse to supply nano-SIMs to prepaid customers. The guy suggested Tuenti but they were out of stock of Tuenti SIM cards too. I had been considering Movistar rather than Tuenti (also owned by Telefonica) because of the short duration of my stay and I didn't want to buy a whole gigabyte. Anyway, the guy then sent me across Plaça de Catalunya to Fnac, where there is another Movistar shop upstairs, but there was luckily a girl on the ground floor selling Tuenti SIM cards at a temporary stall. I therefore bought a SIM card for €12. She was extremely helpful and gave me detailed instructions on how to set up my online login to specifically the mobile section of Tuenti's web site. Without these instructions, I would have struggled as it was far from obvious how to do this, and I would have probably only set up a profile on Tuenti's social network. It was not possible to opt out of the 1GB initial bundle and pay €0.0363/MB from the outset and I eventually used 200MB during my entire stay, which would have cost the same at the pay-as-you-go rate. The balance, after buying the 1GB bundle for €7.25, was €4.74. This means that the €2 higher cost of buying the SIM card in a shop (€12) compared to online (€10) is reflected directly in €2 more additional credit.

I then spent two weeks working in Spain in February, in Barcelona and Madrid. My two Spanish colleagues are on Vodafone and Orange, and there were many places, both at work and elsewhere, where I had a signal and they did not. In fact, with Tuenti (running on Movistar), there was not one place where I experienced no coverage. Even on the 300km/h AVE train from Barcelona to Madrid, I had my laptop tethered to my iPhone and the connection didn't drop out once during the whole journey, even in tunnels.

The only difference in the Canary Islands will be the lower VAT. I am guessing (but I'm not sure) that instead of paying €7.25 (€6 + 21% VAT) for 1GB of data, you'll pay €6 + 7% VAT = €6.42.