Fone Forum

O2 have recently changed their Text Anytime PAYG tariff to Text and Web. They are currently running a promotion for people who order free SIMs by the end of October and top-up by 17th November, where they will get unlimited texts (Actually 12,000) for a £10 monthly top-up instead of a usual £30 monthly top-up. I believe peope who get this deal then keep it forever. This may be very good for people who want lots of free texts!

http://freesim.o2.co.uk/

I happen to have enquired about this new Pay & Go tariff at the local O2 shop this morning, and I was intending to message you about it.  Although their website says you must order the SIM by the end of this month, I am told that in practice the offer has been extended to the 17th November, ( and may yet be further extended because of its popularity. )  I was also assured that one could get a free SIM card from an O2 shop provided that a minimum topup of £10 was made at the time.

There are 2 good things combined in their £15 topup offer.  On the internet side, they do made a reference to a FUP, but the knowledgeable assistant to whom I spoke told me that he did not believe that an actual limit had been placed on the data use.  He did say clearly that the internet could only be used on your mobile, ( implying you would be cut off if you tried to use it for other purposes ), but he said that he believed you could use as much data as you liked on your mobile.

EDIT:-  Please see correcting post below, in reply #4        ;)

Secondly, for a £10 topup or more, you get their 'unlimited texts'.  He said this meant 12,000 in practice.  The only trouble with this is that this is more than can be used on your standard SMS topup service with a daily limit of 300 texts.  12,000 / 30 = 400.
Can you offer any suggestions about how such a generous number of texts could be used on your service please Mikael.  Could the limit be raised, or could you allow 2 different accounts to be credited alternately possibly ?

Well the current limit is 300 texts per day. I hope to finally increase this to 400 within the next month or so which will be the final increase.

As far as the data is concerned, I am wondering if you could use a laptop via a data cable to a mobile, or place the SIM in a dongle, but use the internet settings intended to be used for a mobile?

Thanks to MH for his comment and Thanks to Mikael for his offer of increasing the limit. I hope Mikael will do his job ASAP and we can have more sms topup.

First, I must correct what I said yesterday in my reply #1.  The guy at the O2 store let me know that he had double checked with the O2 network, and found out that he was mistaken.  They do have a FUP, and it is set at 500 MB.
This is somewhat disappointing, though it is still a lot better than what was available on O2 Pay & Go before.
Up until now, it cost £7-50 per month to subscribe to a WEB Bolt On, which only gave 200 MB.  So 500 MB, although it can hardly be described as 'unlimited', is nevertheless a lot more generous.        ;)

With regards to Mikael's question about cables and dongles, my own experiments show this to be network dependent.
'3' are very good, and you can get away with using your data any way you want, which is surprising - seeing that they charge half as much, for twice the amount of data, on a Pre-Pay internet monthly Add On, than they do for their contract users !        :o

However, you definitely cannot get away with such tricks on the T-Mobile network.  Any Virgin user who tries to use their SIM outside of their mobile 'phone soon discovers that the data charges mount up very quickly, and will be charges FAR more then 30p a day.  ( My own experiment cost me ~ £8 I seem to remember ! )        ???

Now the case of O2 is quite interesting.  I have a pay & go dongle, which I got for the free WiFi access, but I cannot use a WEB Bolt On on a pay & go SIM in it at all.  O2 seem to recognize that it is not a dongle SIM !
So that rules out dongles I believe.        :'(

I have not been able to try using a cable to connect, as none of my O2 mobiles will take one.  What I can say, however, that if you have a netbook with an embedded SIM, these do look like it is being used in a mobile to the networks, ( '3', O2, and T-Mobile included ), so the answer is to use such a netbook if you want to connect to the internet via a PC.  I believe that to be a safe option on all networks.        ;)

HTH.