OT: Family mobile phone deals

[Dave Liquorice]

Remember it's 3. Coverage is not as good as O2, VodaPhone, EE. May not be an issue for the OP but worth bearing in mind.

[Dave Liquorice]

How does she SMS you after running out of credit wibbling?

The triple credit from Tesco is worth a look. Top up £10, phone is credited with £30. The free credit is used before the cash credit but IIRC expires after 30 days.

[Tim Watts]

Indeed - and yet a monthly SIM will not stop her from running up insane bills...

Thanks for the tip - the only condition is that they must use EE's network.

[AnthonyL]

The issue isn't how often he tops up but how the top-ups can be limited.

Mine is limited to 2 top-ups/month - ?10, so the max I can lose is ?20 plus any current credit. But if for some reason I have a genuine need for some additional credit beyond my normal usage I don't have to worry.

PS I've never auto-topped up more than ?10 in any 3 month period.

[Alan Braggins]

Having a limit of topping it up once or twice a month doesn't mean that you have to top it up every month. It means if there's a month where you are using it much more than normal, for example roaming on holiday, it gets topped up more often automatically. So long as you can set the limits, you can trade off convenience against risk.

If you're having to top it up frequently because you're being scammed and ignoring the notification messages, you'll probably be in the same situation with a monthly tariff anyway.

[Chris French]

Both I and DD1 are on Giffgaff (SWMBO would be as well if she would get her PAC from O2) calls texts between GG numbers are free, so even if she is out of credit she can contact me. Actually, she normally has a Goodybag (a bundle of minutes/text/data) so wouldn't normally be out of minutes anyway. She normally pays a bit extra to get unlimited texts anyway

[Chris Bartram]

I have auto-top-up and auto goodybag renewal on giffgaff. You can set a maximum number of auto-top-ups per month. It all works very well and giffgaff to giffgaff calls are free provided you top up once every 3 months.

[Chris Bartram]

I find giffgaff very good. If you buya goodybag at £5, £7.50, or £10 for

3G per month, you get 250M/500M/1GB

yes, as someone has pointed out, each SIM needs an account, but that's easy, I have 2 accounts, me and SWMBO, and they both top-up from my card. Painless, no contract, no stupid vouchers, no fuss, and if you find you're exceeding the allowance of a lower goodybag, you can just apply a larger one once it expires- you can chop and chnage as you see fit.

[Dave Liquorice]

Tesco are O2.

Why must it be EE?

[Tim Watts]

Because noone else has decent coverage in my area :-o

[stuart noble]

Three rarely works in our house, but the Three In Touch app routes everything through wifi. Calls have been fine too, so not bothered about a signal

[Dave Liquorice]

Fairy Nuff. I'm surprised though. Vodafone has the edge around here as they have a cell above one village that none of the other operators have. But that village is in the next valley over so no good for me. We can just see a 3 cell about 5 miles away but only 'cause we are up high as well, it's not visible in the town or our village which has no or minimal mobile coverage at all.

[Dave Liquorice]

Just jumped ship from being on contract with Orange since '93 (when they launched). I looked at straight PAYG and PAYG with "bundles"/"goody bags".

Straight PAYG is expensive. And I couldn't come up with any practical difference between a PAYG bundle of x/y/z mins/txts/data that lasts

30 days and a monthly contract for x/y/z. Except the price contract tended to be cheaper...

Ended up on The Peoples Operator, £9.99/mon sim only, monthly rolling contract 750/750/1.5GB. Reasonably please so far, once they have kicked EE into getting incoming CLI working (it works to voicemail but not to the phone). Apparently they have a number of customers with this problem.

This means I've spoken to CS and they are real people who speak real english not call center droids some where else on the globe. The do call back and are still chasing the problem. GNAS also get a small donation as well.

500 from your TPO sim'd phone isn't any good for CS but the 0333 number is.

[tony sayer]

Were dumping a mobile that was on Vodafone and going to 3 with their all you can eat DATA tariff. Thus far its as good as Voda and seems to be as good as anything else.

Certainly 3G coverage is very good and it does fallback to 2G Orange if required. We're soon to test their European roaming which is claimed to the same prices as at home apart from a few types of picture text..

[Theo Markettos]

Not necessarily. Monthly tariffs typically exclude international calls for instance. Usually those are cheaper on PAYG but typically you have to go to an MVNO to make them sanely priced.

Theo

[John Rumm]

Yup I was looking at them yesterday...

I expect for one or two of our phones, then basic no add ons package would work out costing next to nothing per month. The other two could probably benefit from some bundled data and calls. So it ought to be possible to keep it all inside the £30 ish a month I am currently spending.

(I spoke to EE about their "shared" plans. They were talking telephone numbers in the wrong way! You can only qualify for the plan if you buy a phone from them on a 24 month contract. So by the time you have done that with a moderately good enough package to be worth sharing, you are in for £60/month before you even start adding the other phones. Might not be such a bad deal if you want 4 reasonably high end phones into the bargain, but a non started for SIM only.

[Chris French]

I've been happy with them.

Customer support is limited - Questions re your account you can contact an agent - but only via the web. the idea is most questions are answered via the forums.

But I've never had need to contact them anyway.

[alan_m]

Giffgaff are O2!

[alan_m]

With GG the normal PAYG credit doesn't run out if you don't use it. If you have low usage on a phone you can top up, say, £10 and it will stay there until you make calls/text/data to spend it. You still have to make one call every 2/3 months??? to keep the number alive although GG will send you an email warning about this in good time. I keep a cheap emergency phone in the glovebox of my car with a GG PAYG SIM and it still works after putting one lot of credit on it 2/3 years ago.

GG Goody bags that give X amount of minutes/text/data for a fixed price do run out after 30 days if you don't use it.

It is possible to have both on the same SIM.

Be aware however that in my experience O2 coverage can be a bit flakey in many areas.

[Chris French]

Yes, GG use the o2 network, but she still needs to get a PAC to move over to GiffGaff (which would be cheaper, which would be the reason for moving, not to use a different network for other reasons)