Hey, we'll do 4G for £15, says O2 (just mind how you go on the 1GB limit) O2 is touting a new low-cost, low-limit route to 4G mobile broadband, and slipped in a few price rises for good measure. It's still not quite as low as Three UK. Calls on O2 Pay & Go are now billed by the minute, rounding up to the nearest minute; so a call lasting 1min 21sec will now count as 2min. And O2 has dropped its …
Yes all the Three plans changed back in March 2014 and it has caused much discussion... ho hum...
The Three website isn't particularly clear, but the details are:
The only plan now on Three that supports unlimited tethering/"personal hotspot" is the "The One Plan 1 month SIM 30-day contract" which has "2000 minutes and 5000 texts & All-You-Can-Eat data" which costs £23 pcm.
All other current plans support tethering only up to the lower of the monthly data limit or 2G if it includes "All-You-Can-Eat data". They do do an "All-You-Can-Eat-Data" add-on (£5 rolling one month add-on) which includes a 1G "personal hotspot" limit. So the maximum tethering data usage in any one month is 3GB.
However, if you are on a legacy plan that does not limit data usage and tethering then you retain this capability until you change your contract/phone.
Yep... definitely not competitive against 3 with its unlimited 4G data deal. Ditto, GiffGaff are offering a similar 4G package (running on O2's infrastructure) at £12.99. However, if the price difference isn't too much (and e.g. BBC iPlayer still requires a wifi connection to download/stream shows) then maybe the majority of people just won't bother to move.
FYI Giffgaff (or is that Apple ?) have just pushed out a carrier update which now enables tethering on iPhones (along with changing the carrier ID from O2 to giffgaff). As previously stated, tethering is only allowed on all *limited* data plan goody bags.
See http://community.giffgaff.com/t5/Tips-Advice/Official-iPhone-carrier-file-23-5-14/td-p/13187949
Yeah they tried all of that, even changing the signal somehow on the nearest base station (Hey,I'm just quoting their "technical support" don't down vote the messenger), still didn't work and would have only fixed at home anyway, no good as soon as we stepped out the door.
I quite like the idea of a Femocell, are they like a bunch of women that come round your house to make up for the loss of signal?
"Calls on O2 Pay & Go are now billed by the minute, rounding up to the nearest minute; so a call lasting 1min 21sec will now count as 2min. And O2 has dropped its Talkalot tariffs that lowered call costs from 25p a minute to 2p a minute."
"O2 however cannot rest on its laurels having lost 208,000 pay-and-go customers the first three months of this year"
Anyone might think they'd just been bought out by France Telecom.
So per second billing goes by the wayside?
Not quite sure what to make of that, Orange used it as a fantastic launch gimmick, but I guess in these days of inclusive thirty-day contracts with hundreds or thousands of minutes included It's a bit of a moot point these days.
I think the bigger story at the moment are the new EE tariffs and mobile broadband. Now that contracts from the other networks are available, it looks like the margins are finally being squeezed. I spoke to them this morning and they trebled my 4G broadband data allowance whilst simultaneously cutting the monthly cost by £2. Whilst that still doesn't make it be offering quite as cheap as Three, it does bring it into the same ballpark.
I recall the Orange per second billing publicity among other innovations. Ah those were the days of proper mobile competition!
If you have unlimited minutes you don't care if calls are rounded up to the next minute.
If you use 200/5000 minutes a month you probably don't care.
If you are making a chargeable call of 2.01 at 45p/min (Some 08x numbers are charged in this ball park) making the call 90p rather than 46p you very much do care after you've made several calls like that.
Depending on the calls you make it isn't entirely moot.
The story doesn't make it clear it has a link to the O2 price changes:
http://www.o2.co.uk/pricechange
I hadn't been aware of this until I saw this story.
I have an O2 PAYT handset which I kept going after the contract expired in 2003. I only took on the contract to get a GSM1900 handset for use in USA back when O2 sold unlocked handsets by default - the 12 months O2 contract was £10 cheaper than buying the same handset outright.
I put it on the declining tariff PAYT so 25p/min for the first three minutes a day then O2/Landlines were 5p/min during the week and 2p/min at weekends. A cracking rate at the time and still pretty damned good if you don't have a contract with loadsa minutes. It was handy to keep going as a spare (e.g. when main mob had no coverage or a flat battery) for the sake of a £10 top up once every 3 years. Money for old rope for O2 since I never called CS and only turned it on when I wanted to make calls.
It has less than £2 credit now and was getting close to top up time. I'll probably let it lapse so they've lost another PAYT customer. As the AC commentard said above - have they just been acquired by France Telecom?!
do like to play some silly buggers.
I'm on a 24 month contract, and a few months back, I got a friendly text informing me that I was being moved onto an equivalent 4G contract. Same price, same data caps (1gb, still more than I can use in a month). Conveniently, I mainly get 4G when I'm at work, and have Wi-Fi, or at home, when I have Wi-Fi.
We don't all stream porn on our phones, you know.
My heaviest data usage was during the Snooker World Championships, when I had iPlayer on all afternoon and part of the morning five days a week for two weeks. I still didn't go above 3GB for the month.
They can use several techniques but one of the most common is inspecting the HTTP headers - if a header passing through their network for instance reads "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/35.0.1916.114 Safari/537.36" and the source IP address belongs to a phone, it's a good bet someone is tethering. Additionally - if a network request to windowsupdate.microsoft.com is seen - it's a good bet someone is tethering.
Forge the headers, change the user agent and if tethered to a Windows system stop Windows update service. I don't see what the problem with tethering is. Seems to me the data is paid for why does it matter where the data goes after hitting the phone. Is it just that the telco's want to charge more for data going to a device other than the phone? Seems like a scam to me. Could someone explain?
If I buy a gallon of petrol it costs the same whether it is put into a Ford Focus or a Ferrari.
They perform packet inspection on HTTP headers, if they see a desktop browser user agent then it's naughty time for you.
Before I switched over to a sim only plan that included tethering I got around that limit by simply tunnelling the traffic through an SSH connection. It is pretty easy to bypass, use a VPN, tunnelled SSH etc.
So.... if you're tethering an Android tablet through an Android phone... you're not likely to get caught?
I can get 500MB of data included for £10, lasts for a month, with anything over that or beyond the month, costing 1p per MB. So, theoretically, my tenner can get me approx. 1.5GB of data less any phone calls. The £10 also lasts until you've used it up, not a set time limit.
£7.50 for a data-only sim deal gives me 1GB of data and no phone calls. I could up it to £15 and get a much more generous 10GB of data, but, as I use very little (wi-fi at home and work and mobile data turned off unless I want it on - who needs email notifications when you're driving?), it'd be pointless.
Now, if they'd give me a PAYG data-only sim that cost me 1p per MB and had no time limit, I'd have one. If I can have that deal in a phone, why not in a dongle or mifi?
> Now, if they'd give me a PAYG data-only sim that cost me 1p per MB and had no time limit, I'd have one. If I can have that deal in a phone, why not in a dongle or mifi?
Double plus this. (Just repeating it in the vain hope that someone feeds it back to the people that design these phone plans.)
Just upgraded after looking around and I came across a bit of a boo boo on the upgrades. A Samsung 32gb Note 3 in black, unlimited everything for £25 a month. White was £43!
Needless to say, I ordered it, was delivered and first payment taken for the correct amount
Love the phone too!
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