Unrestricted PAYG GPRS/3G?

weegie.geek

Is there such a thing?

I'm looking for unrestricted, not unlimited. Unrestricted as in I can do more than just browse the web. I've got a Windows Mobile based phone, and I'd quite like to be able to use remote desktop among other things, but O2 for one don't let you.

It was a pain in the rear setting the phone up for O2 in the first place, since they "don't support it on PAYG", even though it's an ex O2 contract phone, and a bit of searching around on the web gave me the correct settings.

So I can browse the web, but that's all. No pop/imap email. No remote desktop. No MSN messenger or anything like that. It's not restricted by port, since I can browse to a webserver running on any port I set it to. It's restricting the type of traffic.

Sorry for the long-windedness of it, but I thought it'd be better to explain what I'm after and why.

So I want something that'll let me do this, but on PAYG. I can go days or weeks at a time without having to use the phone when I'm out and about so I'd really grudge paying for a contract. I rarely text, and I rarely speak on the mobile, so the inclusive minutes would go to waste. I'm only interested in the data.

O2 do a bolt-on that gives 200MB for £7.50 a month, and 200MB should be more than enough. The only problem is that the O2 PAYG service is useless to me.

I'm hearning good things about T-Mobile's Web and Walk. It's unrestricted in what you do with it apparently. They do a thing where it's capped at £1 per day, for people who use it sporadically. I'm thinking it'd be the best thing for me, assuming the PAYG W&W is unrestricted too. I probably wouldn't use it more than a few days a week so it might be the best bet for me. They appear to do a bolt-on type thing for £7.50 a month, but from what I can see it's only for contract customers, right? Any way to get this on PAYG?

dad-of-4

not sure if this will be helpfull, but i was using my PAYG mobile as a modemto hook upto the net whilst waiting for my BB connection to be sorted, it is on orange, unlimited access for £1 a day, or 5 quid a week, cant fault the service for what it is, tho its a bit rubbish for running a PC's net connection,

the only draw back i found was having to ring CS cos my toip up wasnt working only to be told that it doesnt work unless you have calling credit, I must admit i thought it was complete nonesence when the guy said put a top up on and it will work, i was convinced it wouldnt and i would be phoning back, lol, but it did work.

just to add the only restrictions were the blocking of pages using orange safeguard, it can be turned of tho, however after being told all i needed to do was register the phone, they then told me i needed to register a debit card, so i didnt bother.

weegie.geek

Ca you confirm you can do non-http stuff with it though?

Cavey

weegie.geek wrote: »

I'm looking for unrestricted, not unlimited. Unrestricted as in I can do more than just browse the web. I've got a Windows Mobile based phone, and I'd quite like to be able to use remote desktop among other things, but O2 for one don't let you.

Really? The O2 site says the only thing you are not permitted to do is continuously stream audio/video, use VoIP and/or P2P, but that might be contract phones if you are talking about PAYG.

weegie.geek wrote: »

So I can browse the web, but that's all. No pop/imap email. No remote desktop. No MSN messenger or anything like that. It's not restricted by port, since I can browse to a webserver running on any port I set it to. It's restricting the type of traffic.

Interesting. What have you got it set to? Are you using the mobile settings or the wap settings?

And you might also want to think about three.

weegie.geek

Cavey wrote: »

Really? The O2 site says the only thing you are not permitted to do is continuously stream audio/video, use VoIP and/or P2P, but that might be contract phones if you are talking about PAYG.

Yeah, I think the contract customers aren't restricted in what they can do with the service. It stinks really. I pay more per unit of data transferred than a contract customer would, yet they restrict me to http traffic. Perhaps some of the things I want to do are rather esoteric, but to block email?

Interesting. What have you got it set to? Are you using the mobile settings or the wap settings?

And you might also want to think about three.

I've had to set it up to fire traffic through o2's proxy server, using gprs to connect just now.

I considered three, but it seems that they block traffic to http only as well.

weegie.geek

Well I dug out a t-mobile sim I had in a drawer (gotta love hoarding!) and put a tenner on it and all seems well.

Email, RDP work fine. I'll try FTP and some other stuff when I get a chance. IRC didn't appear to work, but that might've just been the server I tried, or my settings or whatever. I'm getting there!

So, in summary, for PAYG grps/umts, O2 = bad, Tmob = good.

deano27_2

I am using Orange PAYG for £1 for all day, which is very good, but obviously the bandwidth is very low ...40kb?? but good enough for email news etc.

weegie.geek

is that 40KB or 40kb? If it's 40kb then it sounds like you're using gprs rather than UMTS/HSPDA.

if it's 40KB then it look about right for UMTS.

And when you say news, do you mean news as in current affairs as in sky news, or do you mean news as in usenet?

deano27_2

weegie.geek wrote: »

is that 40KB or 40kb? If it's 40kb then it sounds like you're using gprs rather than UMTS/HSPDA.

if it's 40KB then it look about right for UMTS.

And when you say news, do you mean news as in current affairs as in sky news, or do you mean news as in usenet?

Eh? is the difference that much KB & kb as they still mean the same thing give or take a few bytes.

(1,024 versus 1,000), the difference is 2.4%)?

Are people still using decimal format when discussing bandwith?:eek:

GPRS yes and it is fine for sky news, bbc news etc.

weegie.geek

deano27 wrote: »

Eh? is the difference that much KB & kb as they still mean the same thing give or take a few bytes.

(1,024 versus 1,000), the difference is 2.4%)?

Are people still using decimal format when discussing bandwith?:eek:

GPRS yes and it is fine for sky news, bbc news etc.

Lowercase b is bits.

Uppercase B is bytes.

Bytes = 8 bits, so there's an 8x different when converting bits to bytes.

What you're thinking of is the difference between KB and KiB, or Kb and Kib, where K = 1000 and Ki = 1024.

Leopard

When I looked in to this (I'm not a techie!) T-Mobile told me that their data-capped-at-£1-a-day PAYG is only intended for simple tasks with a smartphone and somewhat slow for use as a laptop modem because it operates at about half a mbps speed, whereas if you pay the £7.50 a month you get full 3G/HSPDA speed with a laptop.

I've recently had my O2 tariff swapped to one (at the same price) which includes data-capped-at-£1-a-day on my monthly account and am now experimenting with it. O2 only brought this in to match Orange but I've been led to believe that - unlike T-Mobile's - you do get full 3G/HSPDA on O2's data-capped-at-£1-a-day. We shall see...

It's extremely difficult to find out anything about O2's because the people in the O2 shops don't know how it works and O2 itself seems to be anally retentive about it generally. I don't think they want people to use it. I couldn't glean anything from their website.

For getting my (Apple) laptop on to the Internet when Ethernet (wired or wireless) is not available I prefer to use Bluetooth with a 'phone rather than a plug-in USB appendage which uses up one of the two USB ports on my computer.

One advantage of this - apart from the convenience of it - is that you can put the 'phone where the signal is strongest (e.g. on the balcony of a hotel room, or hung on the window frame) and beam the Bluetooth signal to somewhere where it's more convenient to use the computer but where the cellphone signal may be weak!

Do keep exploring this and hopefully we'll finally find out some proper answers! :mad: