Prepay price plan for National & some International calls?

sat matt

Hi,

I'm looking for recomendations for a new mobile price plan and if I'm honest, my head is melted with other stuff so hoping someone here might come to my aid


As in the title, I'm looking for a call friendly plan. The destination breakdown would be something like 50% Irish mobile, 25% Irish landline and the remainder split across UK and Holland. My hope is that the plan would include sufficient minutes to effectively make the Irish calls "unlimited" or make the Irish mobile unlimited at least. The International calls could come from credit or an add-on perhaps

Data isn't too important but would like to keep above 1GB to be safe. 3G will do, 4G isn't required

SMS isn't important


I'd prefer prepay but a 30-day rolling plan would suit also. Anything but another 18 or 24 month contract!



I see Lyca getting mentioned around here and have heard good feedback about Tesco also. The prepay and 30-day market is damn crowded now though and my two attempts to sit and look at this were in vain!


Any suggestions folks?

ED E

With the calls to NL I'd be looking at Lyca or more likely a VOIP provider like blueface or goldfish.

sat matt

ED E wrote: »

With the calls to NL I'd be looking at Lyca or more likely a VOIP provider like blueface or goldfish.

Lyca do seem to have dirt cheap International rates. I'll have to study their plans some more and dig into their T&C's. I'm surprised they aren't more popular as their pricing seems to be the lowest of the pack

I'm looking at this for an elderly crony and while he would be more than capable of learning and navigating a new VOIP app on his smartphone, he would lack... shall we say... the "calmness of mind" to accept that he needs a working data connection for a VOIP call! I'll leave him on good old cellular calling for now I think


As it happens, I've been using the Skype Lite app on my phone fairly exclusively this past few weeks for all outbound calls. It's can be damn good value versus the usual prepay rates and I find it works very well on my 3 data connection. 3's EDGE network is a bit unreliable in places which obviously impacts on the call quality but otherwise on 3G and 4G it's perfect. I've also tested Google Hangouts/G Voice for my outbound calls recently but from my limited testing, it seems they are very aggresively applying some sort of noise-cancelling which can make a real mess of the audio... far too many breaks in the speech

There's no doubt though, on a pre-pay plan with a bit of data, Skype or Google's voice options can be good vfm

As for Goldfish, I haven't tried them on mobile but I have used them extensively in office settings in the past. If I'm honest, I found their payg rates too expensive (IE/UK) and their bundled minutes plans weren't brilliant either. Plus, you can't actually dial out displaying your mobile number iirc so a bit of a non-runner. Blueface... I never used them but I did contact them about a year ago to run through their newer mobile options with me. If I was a little confused before talking to them, I was completely lost afterwards! They couldn't really explain their mobile stuff and the bits they did manage to explain were starting to sound expensive. I will revisit them sometime soon though

ED E

sat matt wrote: »

3's EDGE network is a bit unreliable in places which obviously impacts on the call quality but otherwise on 3G and 4G it's perfect.

No such thing They've just got the vestigial o2 network that they inherited. Its being let rot in preparation for imminent shutdown.