fivemack versus the confusopoly

[fivemack]

I am not entirely ready to trust mobile-phone salespeople on the subject of what tariff I should use for my phone; I have a dim suspicion that they are more interested in their commissions and in the course of action most profitable for their employer than in my best interest.

I have an iphone 3G, I bought it from the Apple Store for £159 with an eighteen-month contract provided through O2 seventeen months ago. I have been paying £35 a month since, which I think of as a £20 contract fee plus £15 paying off the implicit loan for the difference between what the iphone costs and what I paid for it.

I now have a paid-for iphone 3G. I've no desire at all to spend £400 on an iphone 3GS, whether as a lump sum or as an implicit loan. I would like the phone I currently have to continue working.

In the last nine months I've used 315MB of received cell data and 32MB of sent cell data, and in the phone's lifetime 12 hours of voice calls; I would expect to be able to get that level of cellular network access for a fiver a month at most, and be making my provider most of a fiver a month in pure profit by so doing. How do I go about doing so?

Comments

[naath.livejournal.com]

Did you extract your useage information from O2? or just remember it? or does you phone know it? See, I'm disorganised. But also about to reach the end of my contract.

You are right that O2's offering is 20/month, but of course it comes with phone calls... which, yeah, I don't use those. Also think O2 kinda sucks, although I don't know how hard it is to switch my phone to a different network.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

On an iphone, settings .. general .. usage has all this usage information, counted 'since last reset'; I don't remember what it was before I resetted it at the start of April, but the last nine months have been average enough months that I don't think it matters.

I would expect most phones to record this information somewhere, but I wouldn't be startled if it weren't always readily accessible.

[naath.livejournal.com]

Ah yes, found the log. 200M data in, 25M out, 9 hours calls out.

Over 16 months I think. So about the same as you.

[naath.livejournal.com]

Oh, drat the weasel buggering confuseopoly.

O2 will do you all the texts and internet you want if you top up 15L/month on the pay-as-you-go tarriff. Which... why would I pay 20L/month instead hmmm? I might go for this actually (partly because I'm LAZY and switching network is FAFF); I calculate that my phone calls would be 10-20L/month and don't forget texts cost money.

3 have a similar deal - any top up will get you 150M data for 90 days; I guess top ups come in 10 poundses. So that's actually 10 pounds every three months (unless you use more than that in calls). That looks good if your phone-call/text use is low; but I guess you have to watch the data use.

Of course with those deals you have to remember to top up at the appropriate time.

[scat0324.livejournal.com]

I use Three PAYG - You get the "free" data allowance even from a five pound top-up and once that is used up (150Mb or 90 days, whichever is sooner), you can use the fiver in the top-up to buy "unlimited" (2Gb, iirc) data for a month. Of course, if you send more than 25 texts, or make even one call, your balance will go below £5 and you'll not have enough credit to buy the data add-on - so occasionally, I top-up £10 instead (which gets 600 "free" texts - I balance that against having two lots of 150Mb by topping up 5 quid twice). But effectively, yes if you're careful, for a fiver you can get a data connection for 4 months.

Presumably you'll not get "Visual Voicemail" since Three don't supply iPhones so haven't got the support on their network, and similarly you'll not be able to get Three-branded Skype which connects to their own Skype servers to make free Skype-to-Skype calls. If it's anything like my Touch HD, which also isn't supported by Three, you can install vanilla Skype, but the calls will come out of your data allowance.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

O2 will unlock your iPhone for you for free -- details here. Takes about two weeks. After you've done this, the cheap PAYG SIM+data package of your choice will do the job. I gather three.co.uk has some good deals whereby whenever you buy a voice/sms top-up you get 150Mb of data thrown in.

[numberland.livejournal.com]

Unlock and then PAYG. Alternatively if you phone O2 and say you are thinking of leaving them they may be able to give you a extremely good deal (e.g. £150 back instead of a new phone when signing up for a contract etc).

[naath.livejournal.com]

150 quid to carry on with a 40/month contract instead of going to the 20/month SIM only contract seems... perhaps foolish. Probably only for people who want the 150 pounds to buy a phone that O2 don't sell.