Vodafone datacard & GPRS

[dk]

Has anyone tried using a Vodafone GPRS Datacard in their laptop to recieve email and browse the web whilst abroad? Any good? Expensive? I notice you can get them in the UK now for £50 including £20's worth of calls, and no contract. Can you get the same PAYG deal for GPRS elsewhere in Europe, especially France? Ie - can i buy a PAYG GPRS SIMM in France and/or Spain?
Thanks

 

[Grehan]

It is HUGELY expensive.
We tried it for 18 months - it had seemed like the ideal way to keep in touch. And not too expensive. Really?

Vodafone UK helped themselves to large sums of money each month from our bank account. In the end, after six months of constant pressure (the stress and worry for us was enormous) they refunded about £1,000 back, which did not include the cost of calls to them and our time and worry.
Then having been without a way to dial up etc for some months we tried Vodafone Spain. I know . . but the costs and charges they said would apply would have made the thing about 1/5th UK's.
Only trouble was, the accounts department then tried to charge on the basis of voice calls, not a data connection. Which was also potentially hugely expensive - about 250 euros each month.
Only this time we were a bit wiser and gave bank account details which only had 30 euros in it to start off with (the rough cost we thought would apply according to their printed data tariff - we were going to transfer 30 euros each month into that account). So the first month, when they tried to take 200 out (it wasn't even a complete month) the bank wouldn't have it. From then on it was awful trying to deal with half-wits that don't even speak English (my Spanish is OK but not up to complicated telecommunications bill dispute conversations). That's no reflection on Spaniards - the UK halfwits were equally stupid.

Now we've junked the damn thing.
Pox on Vodafone. Pox on their Mobile Connect.

GPRS technology actually worked rather well. Well, very well, actually.
It is just possible that P.A.Y.G might be ok. At least there's a limit to the cost each time.

 

[BrightAngel]

dk.... where did you get an offer like that please?.. I asked about a week ago and they wanted £150... or so.... and just for the card... and then a monthly fee on top

 

[PeterStone]

I'm glad you posted this - I was considering getting such a card to replace my Blackberry mobile.

I have to say the Blackberry is pretty good in my experience - but I only use it for sending and receiving emails and not for the web. The contract includes a certain amount of data transfer when used in the UK but I have to pay extra when abroad but the costs are reasonable.

 

[colin_jones]

Grehan is corect. I have used Voda GPRS for the past 3 years. It is efficient, but very expensive. The current rate (quoted this week in Exeter) is £6.25 per MB ===== which equates to about 20 web pages. The data bundles you can buy in UK are £2.75 (approx) per Mb, but are not usable ex UK

I have a Orange (Fr) Mobicarte ( PAY Talk) which gives me a Fr phone number, so that I do not pay the offshore part of a normal Voda incoming call.

I considered taking out a Fr Voda contract, but it has to be for a whole year, so is not cost effective for a 5 month cruise.

Like most of us, I was almost desparate to have email direct to the boat but, with experience of costs and how well you can manage without it, now only use it when somebody sends me an SMS to say that something important and immediate is en route. For everything else I use Internet cafffs and the many other terminals to be found in French libraries, post offices, youth info centres and some marinas.

 

[Guest]

'scuse me if I missed it in your post, but do you not use your local (French) sim card to receive e-mails direct to the boat through your mobile? Obviously only works economically if you have an ISP with a dial-up number in the country that you're visiting, but most ISP's have agreements that give local dial-up numbers around the world.

It makes receiving e-mails pretty cheap, since it's only the cost of a local phone call by mobile.

My apologies if I'm stating the obvious.

p.s. your ISP may impose an annual charge for their 'roaming' service ie. use of local dial-up numbers around the world. A slightly less convenient alternative is to dial up with a local ISP. Obviouly this cheaper approach requires a little research in each country to find a suitable ISP, but can probably be worked out at the same time you buy a local SIM card.

 

[Grehan]

I must go and lie down

With all of these various comments, it's not the cost they QUOTE, it's the amount they CHARGE. :-(
(or rather siphon). A contract gives them carte blanche to take from your bank, whatever they feel like. Then you face an uphill struggle trying to get it back again.

The fact is that the technology is way ahead of the dimwit salespeople, the dimwit people you speak to on the phone, and the dimwit people that invent the bills and grab the money.

And of course, with a blinking card in a computer you cannot phone to complain free, you pay for the call. Or rather callls. Many of them. Then you keep getting emails and text messages telling you to phone them free using your Vodafone mobile phone. Which it isn't and they of all people should know that. But they don't. So as time goes on and make more and more phone calls to try and sort the mess out, you are still paying though the bloody nose. And they keep sending you emails and text messages telling you to phone for free using your Vodafone mobile phone . . . And you wait for hours on the phone call that you're paying for, waiting to speak to a chief dimwit because the usual junior dimwits that answer the phone don't understand what the problem is, or even what GPRS is, or what a mobile connect card is, and there's this bloody tune that plays over and over again, and it's costing you money, then the line gets cut and you have to phone again, and wait again, and it's costing yet more money and time and stress. . . . . . . and there's that bloody Vodafone tune playing again, and again, and again . . . .


AAAAAAARRRRGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!




[know what I mean?]

 

[Guest]

Re: I must go and lie down

Terribly sorry about your pain /forums/images/graemlins/frown.gif

Just, to be clear I woz referring 2 using a local Pay-As-You-Go-type SIM card, so there's limited opportunity for financial damage of the deducting-money-from-account variety /forums/images/graemlins/smile.gif I keep a selection of them in my wallet for each country I spend much time in.

To avoid missing important calls to my British mobile number, I always carry two mobile phones with me: one with my British SIM card, and one with the local PAYG SIM card for the country I'm in.

For example, I got my Latvian SIM card by popping into a mobile shop - walked out with it a couple of minutes later, it cost 5 Lats, but that included 5 Lats worth of calls, so the SIM card was free. Calls 8p a minute fixed rate at any time of day, if I remember correctly.

 

[dk]

Re: Vodafone datacard & GPRS

Hi Brightangel

I saw it here http://www.laptopsdirect.co.uk/asp/product.asp?recorprod=1&product=303&cat=78 It's a PAYG deal so no contract. I don't yet know if there are any hidden catches but it looks a bargain if i can get connected on the same deal in France.
DK

 

[dk]

Re: I must go and lie down

Grehan
Sorry to hear about the stress - i can't say i want any of that thanks! The only reason i was interested in this deal is that it is a Pay as u go jobbie with no contract. In fact they offered to throw in £20's worth of free data time as well! I will enquire further and report back. Meanwhile, see my reply to Brightangel for the link.
DK

 

[pandroid]

I dont understand all this obsession with ISPs. You dont need an ISP if you're using GPRS, which itself is an ISP. Just dialling *99# makes a connection to the net whereever you are and you only pay local rates (on a local PAYG card - not a UK one. If you a UK contract phone you'll be charged about £8 mb) In Sweden on a PAYG phone (£7.50 SIM only, calls included) you pay about £1.50 a Mb.

You only need an external ISP if you want to keep an email address (and receive emails from it) and there are zillions of free ones around. You dont need to actually dial the ISP to get the emails, and to send them you use the telco's SMTP server, not the ISPs - they still appear to come from your email address.

 

[syfuga]

Hi Pandroid,

Tried that in Spain.. you try communicating with a support team that does not speak English!

We now buy a local PAYG SIM card, and use this in conjunction with budgetdialup who have local access numbers in most countries. This works out reasonably.

We had a hell of a time with O2/GPRS and large helpings of loot from our bank account before we gave it all up and cancelled the contract and more importantly the direct debit mandate. Our experience was precisely like Grehan's above.

 

[Anonymous]

Re: I must go and lie down

I know how you feel! It is symptomatic of businesses today employing people who are untrained and, frankly, not up to the job anyway. Everyone who works in engineering is called an 'engineer', everyone who works in an accounts department describes themselves as an 'accountant'. It's ending in grief. Add to this the notion that they can milk their customers every time they phone in via 0870, 0845 and other non-standard numbers and you get a lot of very unhappy customers, like us. Probably there are enough stupid customers who don't notice or couldn't care?

Anyway, for what it's worth, Orange have, over the last year, in the UK, charged exactly per their tariff for my contract GPRS phone (not data card, this is a bluetooth phone). The tariff is horribly expensive and I only use it when I have to - and then with images, sounds, auto-updates, etc. turned off.

 

[Guest]

I haven't used GPRS, so am a little confused that you refer to both local rate call payments AND paying for MB's downloaded. Do you mean have to pay both, or you pay either one or the other depending which country you're in?

Using a local PAYG SIM card to dial up a local ISP number works much better and cheaper if you are downloading e-mails direct to a programme such as Outlook. A mobile is slow (and therefore expensive) to use with a free web-based e-mail service like Hotmail, because you have to download several entire web pages. When on a mobile I set Outlook only to download e-mails smaller than a certain size I choose depending on my mood (100 or 200k). A typical e-mail without attachments takes maybe 10-15 secs to download, realistically I can download I would guess about 3-4 average sized e-mails in a minute including dialling up - in Latvia for example, that would work out at about 2-3p per e-mail.

Free internet e-mails can work out expensive in the end because they end up making you use expensive internet cafes.

Depending on your particular ISP package, your ISP provider may charge extra for access to local dial up numbers in foreign countries. To avoid this, you can look for a local ISP who you can dial direct. At the moment, I'm connected to a Polish telephone provider/ISP, but I am using this connection to send/receive e-mails from my home British ISP e-mail address without any problem and at no cost whatsoever other than the local Polish call charge.

As I'm on the web, I'm using a land line to do this at the moment rather than a mobile, but it works with a mobile in the same way, jusy the local call charge is higher, so it's only practicable for e-mails.

 

[Ships_Cat]

GPRS is volume charged not time charged although there may also be a fixed basic charge. You can stay connected forever and you will then only pay for the data you download or upload.

Your GPRS provider also becomes your ISP, so you do not have to connect to any other - just open up your browser and away you go.

Don't know about Europe, but most other places you get a free email account too, with POP/SMTP.

John

 

[Guest]

I thought so too, but Pandroid said that with GPRS "you only pay local rates", which implies that in some country(ies) you may have to pay telephone charges?

 

[Grehan]

Vodafone datacard & GPRS (spit)

You pay a (hefty) premium when you're outside the country you have the contract in. That was one of the things we were told was not the case when we first bought a GPRS card, which as people have said, is designed for mobile data connection without dialling an ISP telephone number. Sounded good. It isn't.

You may well be supposed to be charged by data volume, but my horrific experience over 18 months "use" in three countries, is that billing departments will continue to charge as if you had a normal voice phone - by call (or rather connection) duration. I don't mean charge, I mean take your money. The theory is entirely different from the practice.

There is also a minimum data packet charge and if your connection keeps dropping out you keep incurring this minimum charge every time you reconnect. Dropped connections are almost inevitable using computers and mobile telecommunications on boats.

Don't believe what spotty salesmen in shops tell you. They know nothing and it won't be them that'll be helping themselves to your bank account.
Don't believe what telephone sales assistants or so-called technical experts tell you either. We got told many different stories by different people (including 'supervisors'), all of which were wrong. In the end Vodafone admitted that their internal intranet guidance system - that the telephone people use to advise the public (I use the word advise, advisedly) - was completely wrong. And so was what we had been told, why we had bought, why we had used and how we had been mugged.

 

[BrendanS]

Re: Vodafone datacard & GPRS (spit)

[ QUOTE ]
In the end Vodafone admitted that their internal intranet guidance system - that the telephone people use to advise the public (I use the word advise, advisedly) - was completely wrong. And so was what we had been told, why we had bought, why we had used and how we had been mugged.

[/ QUOTE ]


Do you have that in writing? If many using GPRS has been mis-sold tariffs, then I suspect they will soon have the regulators and EU after them

 

[Grehan]

Re: Vodafone datacard & GPRS (spit)

In writing . . ?
You'm be jokin' me old son.
It's the customer that does all the writing, faxing, emailing and telephoning.

Quite apart from how they choose to apply them or ignore them, their tariffs are extremely vague. £xx per MB or some such. Buried in the small print, or not, or buried somewhere on their website, they may indicate that 'roaming' carries an extra charge but they will be unable to tell you how much, because that's in the hands of another country's company - even though it's still a Vodafone company. Spain could not tell us how much it would be to use the damn thing in Portugal, and they certainly would not put it writing.

And how do you know how many MBs you're using? You don't, because they tell you (when you query the "bill") that their customer front-end software is not accurate. You just have to believe what they tell you - on the bill that arrives after they've already taken the dosh - about what you've used. Vodafone Spain tried to charge us for connections during the time they had themselves disconnected us because our bank would not pay them because their charge was wrong, which Vodafone themselves admitted (not in writing) was wrong.

We received so many 'apologies' it was incredible. Didn't change a damn thing, though.

 

[Ships_Cat]

Re: Vodafone datacard & GPRS (spit)

Either you have a problem specific to your own self or else Europe is in the dark age regarding tariff service agreements between service providers in the member and other countries.

I live outside the EU and I just checked with my GPRS provider's site (Vodafone by the way ) and it sets out exactly how much I would be charged for use of my GPRS home account (outside of EU) in any EU country I wanted (including the Spain and Portugal that you mention).

At times I am a big user of GPRS for email (sometimes hundreds of megabytes per month because of attachments) but I do not use it roaming internationally because of cost and because I have cheaper alternatives available to me (such as using client's internet connectivity). However, for voice and other international roaming services eg SMS, I have found that the posted charges of my internet provider have been exactly as they state and I have never had any problem whatsoever with incorrect charging (I usually print out the pages for each country I visit off my phone company's site to take with me so I can pick the foreign phone company with the cheapest service agreement with my own provider for the case of voice, etc and to also remind myself to be careful in those countries where costs are very high).

As Brendan says, if they made a habit of hiding costs or cooking the books there would be many that would soon complain and initiate action. I think the main problem is that some customers do not understand what they are letting themselves in for and get a nasty shock when the bill arrives. As everyone is saying, the bill can be very big for GPRS international roaming, especially if you surf the internet using it - in which case you need to be an oil tycoon or something to pay the bill. It is very cheap though if you limit yourself to POP or IMAP email without attachments as the volume of data is very small.

John