My HTC Magic is on a two year "Smart 80" plan. It includes 120 minutes, a swag of txts and pxts and 250MB of data. It costs $80 / month. I'm also part of a family group so usage covered by that doesn't count toward my plan. The result is I get to the end of the month having used virtually no minutes, txts or pxts...but way over my data quota. That has been OK up to now because I've benefited from a promo allowing me to use up to 3GB of data each month. I certainly got used to using 3G data whenever I wanted to. The future didn't look too bright after the promo. I keep finding new ways to blow the roof off my cap.
Friday night, Telecom did some maintenance at the Birkdale exchange and managed to plug my DSL connection into the wrong interface, ending my Internet access for several days. I set my other android phone up so our PCs and other devices could tether to it via wifi and access the Net.
That blew my data quota for the month in a single day. I needed a viable alternative.
The Smart 80 plan won't let me buy more data at any price other than 10 cents / MB once I over my quota. That's $100/Gb. Too dear. Instead, I checked out the Vodafone web site. For $79 / month we could get 3GB of data and another 3GB for only $10 more. I didn't realise at that point an entirely separate SIM chip was involved. It arrived today. I put it my other HTC Magic and it didn't work. After some fiddling around and a call to Vodafone, we worked out the 'live.vodafone.com' didn't work, but 'direct.vodafone.com' worked perfectly. The result is an effective 3GB + 250MB per month, plus a swag of minutes, txts and pxts. For an extra $10 I get another 3GB. Any other formulation would see that amount of 3G data costing me almost $700 / month. Instead it's $168.
Dear, but a lot better than $700!
Daily review 31/10/2025
3 hours ago
Couldn't you get the additional 1GB data bundle for $50 (and $10 for another GB) that they announced last week for tethering on the Smart plans?
ReplyDeleteperrin: I tried to do that, but ended up on a separate account. Hmm. They told me today there is no way to directly add data "chunks" to the Smart plans. Oh....OK.
ReplyDeleteAs for the package, I thought a potential $90 for 6GB was a better deal than a potential $60 for 2GB.
For the extra $30, I get 3 times as much data.