back to article 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 …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    May be worth mentioning...

    ... that the Three deals also allow for tethering which I don't dislike.

    1. James Gwinnett

      Re: May be worth mentioning...

      They do, but only on their One Plan which is £23 a month unless you sign up for a 12 month contract for £20 a month.

    2. frank ly

      Re: May be worth mentioning...

      The last time I looked in detail and read the T&Cs, the 'all you can eat' didn't allow tethering; it was 'The One Plan' that alowed tethering. Has this changed recently?

      Edit: Must type faster.

      1. phil dude
        Linux

        Re: May be worth mentioning...

        nevertheless my N9 powered my Oxford flat for a full month, while the circus of services came to hook up the ADSL.

        I am not sure how they detect tethering (TTL on packets?) but it did not give me any problems.

        P.

      2. Roland6 Silver badge

        Re: May be worth mentioning...

        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.

        1. Roland6 Silver badge

          Re: May be worth mentioning...

          >They do do an "All-You-Can-Eat-Data" add-on (£5 rolling one month add-on) which includes a 1G "personal hotspot" limit.

          Just to add, on some plans the relevant add-on is called "1GB Personal Hotspot", priced at £5 per month.

  2. ACZ

    Not competitively priced, but enough to retain customers?

    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.

  3. GreggS

    If only i could get a Three signal at home!

    Both myself and my wife have had to leave Three as neither of us can get a signal at home or my wife at work. Do GiffGaff allow tethering? EE & Three do on all their packages.

    1. Ol' Grumpy

      Re: If only i could get a Three signal at home!

      I don't think GiffGaff allow tethering on their regular Goodybag packages. From memory, they did something called Gigabags which were for tethering/tablets or PC dongles.

    2. Bonce

      Re: If only i could get a Three signal at home!

      GiffGaff DO allow tethering, but only on their limited data packages. So £10 a month with 1GB data, tethering is permitted. £12 a month with unlimited data, tethering is not permitted.

      http://giffgaff.com/goodybags

    3. Longrod_von_Hugendong

      Re: If only i could get a Three signal at home!

      Three now do femocells, might be worth reconsidering. I moved to Three from Vodaphone and have not look back since.

      1. MatthewSt
        Joke

        Re: If only i could get a Three signal at home!

        Kind of defies the point of connecting up a femtocell to your home broadband connection so you can buy an unlimited data package... ;)

    4. D@v3

      Re: GreggS

      When I looked at GiffGaff, tethering was allowed, on some packages, but it depends on what phone you have. As it is technically PAYG, tethering isn't allowed on iPhones, but should work on 'droids. It's part of the reason I stayed with O2.

      1. aking

        Re: GreggS

        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

    5. James Gwinnett

      Re: If only i could get a Three signal at home!

      Three allow it on their One Plan, not on all unlimited data packages. Still a damn good deal, but it's blocked on the lower priced tiers.

    6. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: If only i could get a Three signal at home!

      My signal on Three at home was utter 5h1t3 but they sent me a signal booster and now all is well.

      1. GreggS

        Re: If only i could get a Three signal at home!

        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?

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Bloody hell, they sound determined...

    "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.

    1. Captain Queeg
      Happy

      Re: Bloody hell, they sound determined...

      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.

      1. paulf
        Facepalm

        Re: Bloody hell, they sound determined...

        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.

        1. paulf
          Thumb Down

          Re: Bloody hell, they sound determined...

          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?!

  5. David Paul Morgan

    i'm on the 5GB plan...

    ... but have to go to Manchester or London to get it! (4G)

    nothing in South Wales/M4 Corridor or Bristol areas yet!

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: i'm on the 5GB plan...

      You're not a journalist are you?

      O2 4G is also in Birmingham, Coventry, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds, Leicester, Sheffield and Newcastle (all outside the London/Manchester meeja bubble).

    2. therealmav

      Re: i'm on the 5GB plan...

      4G... In the M4 corridor? On O2? You're having a laugh. The bus I'm is currently grinding towards Chievelly whilst my phone is stuck in a 2.5G GPRS world. O2, cant you just sort out 3G first.

  6. Caaaptaaaain kick arse

    I just upgraded to a Ferrari

    But I'm only allowed 1 litre of motion lotion a month. What a deal.

  7. Alan Denman

    A load of balls

    I'd suffer 2G Edge with 512MB, 3G up to 20GB and 4G for unlimited.

    Who do they think people are, suckers?

  8. mbreckers

    Three do not allow tethering on some of their contracts now, the £12.90 one does not allow tethering, as that is the one I am on. Cant say for certian for others but, but if i remember correctly, it was only the most expensive 1-month sim only that allowed tethering

  9. D@v3

    O2

    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.

    1. Craigie

      Re: O2

      If you can't use 1Gb a month then you probably shouldn't even have a smartphone.

      I consider myself a light to normal user and use at last 5Gb a month.

      1. Jedit Silver badge

        "I consider myself a light to normal user and use at last 5Gb a month."

        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.

  10. David Nash Silver badge

    Tethering

    How do they know you're tethering? Isn't it all just IP traffic?

    1. Andrew Jones 2

      Re: Tethering

      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.

      1. adnim

        Re: 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.

    2. Mark C Casey

      Re: Tethering

      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.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Tethering

        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?

        1. talk_is_cheap

          Re: Tethering

          The lastest version of Android report tethering back to the carrier, so its very easy to catch people now.

          As for PAYG options, Three do their 321 option, 3p per minute for calls, 2p per text and 1p per MB of data. I'm sure you could put the sim on a dongle as well as a phone.

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Tethering

          > 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.)

    3. Nifty Silver badge

      Re: Tethering

      I read rumours that the latest iteration of Three SIMs have tethering detection in their firmware. FUD?

  11. Kay Burley ate my hamster

    Clearly...

    It's a trick!

  12. Lamont Cranston

    That £12.90 deal from Three sounds ideal.

    Shame I wouldn't touch them with a bargepole.

    Not that any of the others are much better, but at least Orange didn't insult me when I called up to cancel/renew.

  13. beermunster
    Happy

    Will stick with Three

    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!

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I remember it used to be a selling point of networks that they'd charge by the second.

    Now we're back to charging by the minute.

    Soon we'll go full circle and end up paying by the "unit" again, which will no doubt be roughly equal to 5 mins or so enabling a good delve into customers pockets.

  15. ahkiwi

    Tethering

    Wait ... you have to pay to tether ?!

    /rude

    And they charge seperately for 3G/4G data O_0

    /2xrude

    Makes my telco look good

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