Lebara “Free Roaming” Con

dreamypuma

I've personally had no issues with EU roaming on Lebara, furthermore I used Lebara roaming successfully across three different states in India over Christmas.

My parents had an issue last year whilst on holiday.  However this was resolved when I found that that data roaming was switched off in there mobile settings - You may want to check this.

jimjames

Minpago said:

 I did same areas with lyca, voxi networks and had no issues. Therefore avoid this operator and such sites as MSE who will advertise anything as long as they get commission 

Sorry but this is complete BS. I've used Lebara for roaming across many countries with no issues. Just because you have a problem on your phone doesn't mean that it's a scam and that MSE are complicit in it.

pepsi_max2k

In case anyone else is reading this - all the replies are correct. There is both a major issue with Lebara, and none at all, depending on how you look at it 😉

On some phones (clearly not all - possibly older ones without 5G connectivity) Lebara are somehow defaulting people on to 3G connections whilst roaming. In much of Europe (inc UK) the 3G signal no longer exists, which then dumps you on to Edge, which is basically useless for data. 

At this point you pretty much have to force your phone on to a 4G signal. I managed this by heading to settings, changing Voice & Data (iPhone) from 4G to 3G, wait for it to reconnect (to edge), change back to 4G (again wait to reconnect to edge, should be around 10 secs). Then restart phone, and it should connect to 4G at that point. 

You’ll almost certainly have to try this a few times though, and occasionally change the Network Selection to different networks (although only one seems to work in each country, and usually it only eventually works on Automatic selection). 

In short, it usually took me up to 10 minutes of changing between 4G/3G and rebooting before it finally ended up on 4G and could receive any data. And you’ll have to repeat this every single time you turn off the data connection (airplane mode or turn off phone). But it does work. Eventually. Yeah it’s still rubbish 🤦‍♂️