T-Mobile PAYG

mutley282 · Lifetime Member Joined: Jul 28, 2005 Posts: 39

Hello

Has anyone actually managed to get TT Traffic working over GPRS on a T-Mobile PAYG SIM?

I am receiving conflicting reports from T-Mob Customer Support. Sometimes they say it will work and other times they say it will not. It would seem that the PAYG tariffs only allow you to surf T-Zone favourites with the Google search bar and T-Zone pages.

To use TT Traffic you have to use your mobile phone as a modem to stream the traffic data from the GPRS connection to your satnav device. T-Mob say that you cannot use the GPRS connection as a modem on PAYG.

Please can anyone confirm or deny this?

Thanks.

rodderstrotter · Regular Visitor Joined: Nov 10, 2005 Posts: 66

T-Mobile PAYG works fine. There customer services will say it won't work because they don't want you to use the service for anything other than wap .There T&C's say you can't use it as a modem for a laptop, as they want you to go on one of there more expensive data tarrifs, but it does work. They do monitor your usage & if it's high they may give you a warning. I've used mine a few times on a laptop & used over 20Mb of data each time without any complaints from them, so 100kB a day max on tomtom isn't going to be a problem.

mutley282 · Lifetime Member Joined: Jul 28, 2005 Posts: 39

Hello

Thank you for your reply, this is exactly what I expected! I have been doing some market research into all the mobile providers and their PAYG tariffs. T-Mobile are looking like the best with their £1/day maximum charge.

Do you have to ring T-Mobile to get them to activate full GPRS in the first place?

I have also seen their small print about not using your mobile as a modem to stream data and agree that they are saying this just to get you to join one of their more expensive contract tariffs. In my experience TT Traffic only uses typically about 10kB of data per download so that quantity is probably too small for a mobile provider to detect what it actually is and start to complain!

Darren · Posted: Wed Dec 27, 2006 1:09 pm Post subject:

£1/day is a superb price given that O2 and Orange charge something like £3/Mb!

I wonder what they class as fair use though?
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Darren Griffin

mutley282 · Lifetime Member Joined: Jul 28, 2005 Posts: 39

Orange charge £4/Mb and Vodafone charge a stupendous £7.50/Mb!

T-Mobile charge 0.73p/Kb limited to £1/day maximum. If you work that out for 1Mb of data it is 0.0073x1024 = £7.48 i.e. pretty much the same as Vodafone. However T-Mobile's £1/day limit is the current market 'stealer' and works out the best provider to go for.
'Fair Usage' on T-Mobile is 40Mb/day so shouldn't be a problem for any traffic info service as the downloaded quantity is a fraction of this amount.

O2 say you cannot do TT Traffic on PAYG at all even with a data 'bolt-on'.
You can do TT Traffic on O2 monthly contract but it costs a fortune. Not supporting GPRS web traffic on PAYG at competitive rates will cripple O2 in the future unless they catch up with the 21st Century.

Orange and Vodafone both say you can do TT Traffic on PAYG albeit at the high prices listed above and that there is no maximum limit or any way to add a 'bolt-on' type option to reduce the overall cost.

One thing to be wary of; Orange state something like £1/Mb for data traffic. This is for 'Orange World' ONLY. As soon as you go outside Orange World to any other normal web page e.g. tomtom, ebay, bbc e.t.c. you go onto the £4/Mb charge.

rodderstrotter · Regular Visitor Joined: Nov 10, 2005 Posts: 66

If you're using GPRS for traffic only, I wouldn't recommend T-Mobile, as due to the small data usage you are unlikely to reach the £1 cap in a day. Overall for traffic only you're better of with one of the other providers at £4/Mb or £3/Mb, otherwise as you said above, you're paying £7.48/Mb. On a 2 hour journey I find I use about 30Kb max, although this is on tomtom navigator, I'm not sure if the usage might be more on a tomtom unit.

mutley282 · Lifetime Member Joined: Jul 28, 2005 Posts: 39

It all depends on how often you have TT Traffic set to update. If you are only using 30kB in 2 hours you cannot be updating very frequently.

I have TT Traffic set to update every 15 minutes (to keep up with problems on the M6) and it uses about 250Kb in 6 hours. That is way over the £1/day limit and would therefore still make T-Mobile the best.

I suppose the borderline between £1/day and £3/Mb would be crossed if the traffic info failed, you still got stuck in a jam and you then started to surf the web in your car to relieve the boredom!

rodderstrotter · Regular Visitor Joined: Nov 10, 2005 Posts: 66

I've got update to every 5 minutes. On startup I get a 10Kb download, then every download after that usually 1-2Kb. If I do a view an incident it can use more. Easymobile used to be the best, because the data usage was that small it never registered & was never charged! Shame it went out of business last month.
What version tomtom do you use?

mutley282 · Lifetime Member Joined: Jul 28, 2005 Posts: 39

I use TomTom Navigator 6 on a Dell X50V.

The M6 is usually always congested around Birmingham, Stoke-on-
Trent and Manchester and so this probably explains why more data is downloaded.

st1967 · Lifetime Member Joined: Nov 28, 2003 Posts: 189

I use Orange PAYG for my TTT updates and although I don't count the kbs I use I have it set to update every 15min, although this is so hit and miss I tend to do manual updates all the time. I'm driving around 2-3,000 miles on month for work.

I put a £10 top-up on the phone every 3-4 months, and this phone is only used for TomTom Traffic, it's tucked into my armrest in the car.

So with my crude maths and taking a few assumptions about days travelling, even worse case 3 months per topup that is only about 20-25p a day !!

BARGAIN :D
_________________
Samsung S22 Android, Google Maps & Camera Alert

mutley282 · Lifetime Member Joined: Jul 28, 2005 Posts: 39

That's amazing!!

The lady I spoke with at Orange Customer Services deliberatley emphasised the fact that the normal GPRS tariff only covers you for access to Orange World. Anything outside this reverted to the £4/Mb rate.

Maybe this is a carefully orchestrated scam just like the T-Mobile one by giving false information to get you to join a more expensive contract tariff?

The good news is now we are at last finding out which PAYG Service Providers can be used for TTT.

So far T-Mobile, Vodafone and Orange yes, O2 no.

Does anybody know about Tesco and Virgin?

st1967 · Lifetime Member Joined: Nov 28, 2003 Posts: 189

rodderstrotter · Regular Visitor Joined: Nov 10, 2005 Posts: 66

At the moment for tomtom I'm using the fresh mobile with the £10 free credit I got as a bonus for transfering from them from easy mobile (should last a couple of months), I shall have to see what to use next, as fresh charge £7/Mb & the service isn't reliable. I am considering orange at £4/Mb but others on this forum have reported poor service. It would be interesting to see what others usage is for tomtom.
I was considering buying the T1 TMC module for the wife's navman, but on reading the problems others on this forum are having on rececption I think I'll stick to tomtom traffic for a while.

mutley282 · Lifetime Member Joined: Jul 28, 2005 Posts: 39

Yes I have heard of problems with the TomTom TMC Receiver. It is reported to have very poor performance compared to other TMC receivers from Garmin / Navman.

As you say it is probably best to stick to GPRS for the moment as this seems to be far more reliable than TMC.

The next problem is who is best at providing the GPRS service?!

One thing to consider is that only a few mobile phone providers actually own their own hardware used for transmission. For example Tesco mobile is operated by O2 and is therefore likely to give at best the same, or at worst poor performance. Similarly Fresh Mobile are also likely to be just a middleman for some other provider. If they are charging £7/Mb then they could be using either Vodafone or T-Mobile for their service.

It's a closed market much the same as broadband internet i.e. you may be paying another ISP but actually using Tiscali's hardware without necessarily knowing e.t.c.

rodderstrotter · Regular Visitor Joined: Nov 10, 2005 Posts: 66

I would have thought service depended on these four providers, but the only three providers I've used is T-Mobile, easymobile & fresh. They all use the T-Mobile network, yet the only provider I've found to give poor service is fresh. Maybe they're other factor's involved?

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