Be Excellent To Each Other

http://www.knowyourmobile.com/blog/1427 ... aming.html

£5 a day for mobile internet while you are abroad.
That actually doesn't seem too bad really, when you consider wifi prices in hotels and the like. I assume in a year or so it'll get to the point where it is just a £5 add-on per month and you don't need to worry about it anymore. It's a step in the right direction at least!

Fucking tech journalists.

Ooooh, Vodafone now let you use your current contract deal when abroad for £3 a day!
http://www.mobileindustryreview.com/201 ... -3day.html

So everything you do comes out of your standard allowance while abroad, that's even better

O2 let you use your mobile abroad and don't charge more than £1.99 a day for data, from July. I got a text about it yesterday. Calls are a 50p connection charge (both incoming and outgoing) then minutes are out of your allowance.

Yes, I got an email about that yesterday.

Isn't that £1.99 a day for 25mb though?

Have you got a link for this? I looked at the T&Cs for my Munich trip last week and they were still charging the usual £rapeing per MB up to a 40MB limit.

For the same trip, I was looking at this page which talks about local SIM card deals for data and calls. That page is Germany specific but the Wikia presumably covers other countries as well. The gist of it is that you can pick up local SIM card in places like Aldi for cheap that have relatively good data deals (e.g. 1GB of data for 24 hours for €1.99); the downside is that some of the networks in Germany are apparently utter shit so if you end up with a provider on, say, E-Plus you'll probably get shit coverage and speeds.

Hopefully all of that'll become a thing of the past though if the UK networks are going to have proper roaming contract! Hmm, I'm on a really old (and properly unlimited) contract with O2; I bet they say I need to change to a new contract before I can take advantage of this.

Did a bit of poking around on this and I think Gilly's talking about 'O2 Travel' which is essentially £1.99 a day for up to 25MB of data so pretty useless and you're still better off getting a local SIM card if you want anything like normal* useage.

*Normal for me anyway!

It's around 750Mb a month, which is more than most would use while mobile.

I have no idea what I use daily but I would have thought 25Mb was a lot? That works out to about the same as the monthly allowance of an O2 data bundle.

Obviously it comes down to the individual here, but I switched on data roaming on my phone once while in Rome last year thinking I could just do a quick Google maps search and then shut it down without incurring too much of a cost and within minutes I started getting warning texts from O2 about the MBs of data I was going through. And all I've ever got set to auto-sync is Gmail so it's not like I'm suddenly scraping the whole internet or anything. I dunno, maybe I am in the total minority here but 25MB just doesn't seem like very much, especially if you're doing the kind of things you might want to do on holiday (using Google maps, posting pictures to social networks, etc). Having lost my phone on a recent holiday, and thus all the pictures I'd taken, the one thing I'd really like to be able to do on holiday is have my auto-Dropbox syncing work which is going to chew through a decent chunk of data.

Either way though, it's still expensive compared to local deals if the German info I linked to is typical. Tellingly though I never bothered to get set up with a local SIM card because I just couldn't be arsed with the hassle when I got there, which is one of the thing the telco's are probably banking on with their roaming prices.

It sounds like very little to me divided down to the daily rate, but, on further thought, I totally take you and Craster's point that, when you scale it up to the monthly amount, it seems reasonable. I definitely sometimes use more than 25MB a day here at home (allowing apps to auto-update on 3G is a big user of data sometimes) but I'm probably an unusual case and just being weird here so probably worth ignoring me!

750mb a month is a lot, but 25mb a day isn't, if you get my meaning

On average I use only about 300mb a month I think, however on the days that I do use it, I quite easily break 25mb, I just don't use it that regularly. Especially if you are on hols, I would expect that daily use would increase rather than decrease, what with photos, facebook, maps, restaurant guides, news from back home, etc...

02 have offered somthing like this with Blackberry to enterprise customers for a while

You can get full on roaming (in Europe 2-3 weeks a month) or a lighter 5 days a month max for a fixed cost

It works well for them as it keeps IPhones out of the picture as they are more expensive to run in the UK, in the US its the other way around and everyone has an IPhone.

Can't you just get a PAYG sim card when abroad and put like a tenner on it and that'll be cheaper?

There are lots of free wifi points around too I've noticed anyway.

You can, if you don't mind the hassle of buying it, loading it up, then swapping it in every time you want to use it etc...

Someone should release a phone for frequent fliers that has two SIM slots and a software switch for moving between the two.

I don't even have an english one anymore so gonna be expensive when I come back next week if I wanna use my phone!

Frequent flyers are typically the sort of people where mobile phone charges aren't an issue. Expenses see

Can't you just get a PAYG sim card when abroad and put like a tenner on it and that'll be cheaper?

Yes I can.

No good for current smartphones but i've had sim adaptors in the past which took 2 sims (normally a slightly hollowed out rear of the case) and you simply rebooted the phone to switch between them

If you have an unlocked phone, sure.

these exist, even one with three - though asking Helen to remind me suggests it may have been a dream.

Anyway, orange want £8/MB for Japan. So we're relying on free WiFi and lan in hotels and coffee shops, obviously.

What's Ian going to do?

I presume you ring him and he tells you stuff.

It's almost like I've been saying that for most of this thread...



In my experience travelling in the last few years (Rome, bits of Germany, New York) there has never been as many free wifi access points as you'd expect, and certainly not at the times you actually need them. New York especially I was expecting to be pretty good in that respect but the only place we found that consistently had free wifi was Pret.

My advice is to buy one of those pre-pay SIM cards once you get to your destination. Then simply swap and use that while you're there.

When you get home you'd have to change back though, of course.

Or you could pick up a PAYG SIM on arrival for use in that country.

Can't you just be without the internet on your phone for your holiday?

That would mean talking to the wife.

That would involve not tweeting pictures of my surroundings to make people not on holiday jealous.

Does not compute.

(And more seriously, I use my phone more on holiday than I do at home -- GPS, maps, Yelp, TripAdvisor, ...)

I don't think I've ever used GPS or maps or yelp etc... on holiday, it's more fun getting lost and going to eat at places that you have no idea if they are good or not

GazChap-FeEx.

Is it? Is it really?

I've eaten at enough crap restaurants to last a lifetime already. As for getting lost: there's a difference between "let's amble in this direction to see what's there" (you can still do this with a GPS in your pocket) and "I'm tired and I don't know how to get back to where I parked the hire car".

I'm too poor to afford a hire car!

hey, this is exactly what MrsA is doing now to email me isntructions for stuff I'm totally not going to do. BeeX is relevant! YAY.

GO TEAM HUMANITY

Ambling has done us extremely well in japan I have to say, but that's perhaps a special case.