Unrestricted PAYG GPRS/3G?

weegie.geek

Leopard wrote: »

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.

At the moment I'm getting 350kbps but that's plenty for what I want to do with it. It's for my pda/phone, so anything I'll be doing with it will be fine with that speed. If i need faster I can always find a wireless network to use.

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...

I think it should be fine yeah. I think contract customers get full unrestricted access, rather than the http only nonsense O2 make payg customers put up with.

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.

Yeah, I guess the training courses the new recruits go on covers ringtones, camera functions and bluetooth headsets but not much more. In my case even tech support didn't have a clue how to do what I was after, or if it was even possible.

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!

Yeah, the only problem i can see with that is the extra battery drain on both the laptop and the mobile when using bluetooth. I guess if you're in the hotel room you've got sockets but if you're out and about (read: in the pub) then USB might be the best option.

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

If I find out any more I'll post back, for sure. Not sure how useful my info will be to you if you're on contract though.

I've got some Orange sims too so I might fire a tenner on one of those and see how I get on with them. See if I get better speed with them. I'm happy with the T-Mobile speeds/costs but I'll take a look and see how people have got on with Orange, see what costs are like and see if it's unrestricted or not.

Also of note is that the T-Mobile PAYG packages are limited to 40MB/day in the T&C. Checking email (and finding no new mails) uses 6KB by the looks of it (really nice itemisation if you log into your account on their website) and they say they'll limit you if you go over too often. Not sure why they'd bother doing that when you can just get a new sim online for nothing, and start all over again.

2.5p/MB isn't bad though, considering what you're charged for a non-package megabyte. It's still horrendously expensive though.

At the moment I don't see me using more than 40MB/day. That's a hell of a lot of emails and more RDP than I want to have to do.

Leopard

I'm very grateful to you for pursuing this.

In addition to my (now fully-featured) monthly contract SIM on O2 I'm trying, like you, to find the best Internet deal available on a PAYG SIM for my second 'phone - for receiving my incoming 'phone calls and with the ability to put my laptop on to the Net, preferably on a capped rate of £1 per day.

My inclination was towards the idea of a PAYG SIM on O2 for this but your own experience suggests that the T-Mobile option would be better.

I just wish that Virgin would come up with a similar deal for data. I hate all this topping-up business and far prefer the Virgin system for PAYG whereby everything is done by Direct Debit so you never have to worry about running out of credit in the middle of a call, somewhere remote.

Either that, or that the others would adopt the same PAYG system with Direct Debit and auto-topup as Virgin!

Will let you know how I fare with the O2 arrangement on my monthly account.

RussWWFC

T-Mobile works fine for me, if you are going to do a fair bit of browsing then it's well worth the £1.

I can use that with my laptop and for internet radio too, both work fine and are usable.

But I want to be able to use it everyday for a set charge per month. It;s just not worth paying £1 on the off chance of an email.

So are there any monthly deals on PAYG. I even dont mind paying up to £15 per month on contract if I can get unlimited net (as a whole I mean, wish I could get the £7.50 alone on contract with T-Mobile)

weegie.geek

Leopard wrote: »

I'm very grateful to you for pursuing this.

In addition to my (now fully-featured) monthly contract SIM on O2 I'm trying, like you, to find the best Internet deal available on a PAYG SIM for my second 'phone - for receiving my incoming 'phone calls and with the ability to put my laptop on to the Net, preferably on a capped rate of £1 per day.

My inclination was towards the idea of a PAYG SIM on O2 for this but your own experience suggests that the T-Mobile option would be better.

I just wish that Virgin would come up with a similar deal for data. I hate all this topping-up business and far prefer the Virgin system for PAYG whereby everything is done by Direct Debit so you never have to worry about running out of credit in the middle of a call, somewhere remote.

Either that, or that the others would adopt the same PAYG system with Direct Debit and auto-topup as Virgin!

Will let you know how I fare with the O2 arrangement on my monthly account.

O2 PAYG would be fine for just browsing, but anything more than that (pop email for example) will fall over.

T-mobile's the best I've found for payg mobile net access. If you're worried about running out of credit there's always topping up by credit/debit card online or by phone.

RussWWFC wrote: »

T-Mobile works fine for me, if you are going to do a fair bit of browsing then it's well worth the £1.

I can use that with my laptop and for internet radio too, both work fine and are usable.

But I want to be able to use it everyday for a set charge per month. It;s just not worth paying £1 on the off chance of an email.

So are there any monthly deals on PAYG. I even dont mind paying up to £15 per month on contract if I can get unlimited net

It'd be £15/month on PAYG for 30 days' surfing on the web'n'walk 5 day passes.

Half that for an addon for prepay if you want to surf for a month. They seem to be missing a trick here though. Plenty of people would pay £15 a month for unlimited surfing on their phone. I wouldn't use the texts and voice minutes they'd give me.

They do specific plans for mobile broadband though, £15/month. Can you take the sim out of the usb dongle they give you and sling it in a phone? Looks like you can... Might be worth a look for you?

You seem a bit confused though. It's not a fixed charge of £1 for a day as soon as you use the internet, it's capped at £1 a day. It's 0.73p per KB until you've spend £1, so you'll pay for the first 333KB. Checking pop email uses ~6KB, so you'll be looking at polling the server roughly every 30 minutes all day long before you'll benefit from the cap. Obviously if you actually have email (tell it to download the headers only! Don't want spam using up all your money) it'll use more, and if you use webmail it'll use a lot more.

Actually I'm just thinking, you seem to get 10 days free net access once you register your sim. They call it your allowance. So, top up with a tenner. Register the sim. Use your 10 free days. Buy 4 consecutive £2.50 5 day passes with your tenner's credit. A month's net access for a tenner. You can probably hammer it too, since they won't really have time to limit you. At the end of the month ditch the sim and use another free sim. Repeat the process. I wonder... :rotfl:

Obviously if you're going to be using the sim for voice calls you don't want to have to change your number every month, but if it's just for browsing and emails...

RussWWFC

weegie.geek wrote: »

Half that for an addon for prepay if you want to surf for a month. They seem to be missing a trick here though. Plenty of people would pay £15 a month for unlimited surfing on their phone. I wouldn't use the texts and voice minutes they'd give me.

You seem a bit confused though. It's not a fixed charge of £1 for a day as soon as you use the internet, it's capped at £1 a day. It's 0.73p per KB until you've spend £1, so you'll pay for the first 333KB. Checking pop email uses ~6KB, so you'll be looking at polling the server roughly every 30 minutes all day long before you'll benefit from the cap. Obviously if you actually have email (tell it to download the headers only! Don't want spam using up all your money) it'll use more, and if you use webmail it'll use a lot more.

I thought £7.50PM was only for contracts. And they introduced a flat £1 per day charge some time back. My usage is about 75 texts and about 5 minutes of calls per month and I've had the same number for 9 years so I don't want to change it!

weegie.geek

RussWWFC wrote: »

I thought £7.50PM was only for contracts. And they introduced a flat £1 per day charge some time back. My usage is about 75 texts and about 5 minutes of calls per month and I've had the same number for 9 years so I don't want to change it!

Yeah, I didn't mean prepay, I meant contract.

And it's definitely not a flat charge, it's a maximum charge.