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Who did this research?

Did they just pick the worst deal and assume everyone is dumb enough to go with EE?

So I get to go to use Feel at home with my contract http://www.three.co.uk/Discove...
I am currently in Malta on a quick business trip and my phone works as normal with unlimited data,minutes and texts as per my contract.
So this is nothing I need to bother with ever really as i doubt I will have a reason to travel to any country not on the feel at home list.

They use bandwidth management, but it doesn't seem to be as simple as throttling after a certain amount of data used.

I am guessing this http://www.three.co.uk/ Three?

Sounds like a bargain in comparison to UK provider charges. Although Three offers "Feel at Home" free roaming in some places, in places where it doesn't (eg Canada), you'll pay $896 per 100MB. And no, that isn't a typo!

Calling a UK number. £1.40 per minute.
Calling a Canadian number. £1.40 per minute.
Texts to UK. 35p per text.
Texting a Canadian number. 35p per text.
Receiving calls from any number. 99p per minute.
Receiving texts from any number. Free.
Using internet and data. £6 per MB.
Using voicemail. £1.40 per minute.

http://www.three.co.uk/Support...

Seems eminently sensible to me.

Here in the UK Three already allows you to use your contracted minutes and data allowance in some countries, including in the USA, at no extra cost.

http://blog.three.co.uk/2013/1...

I'll be making heavy use of it in a couple of months when I'm heading to Seattle (and Alaska), it'll be far more convenient than buying a local SIM as I did last time I was in the USA.

I'm quite surprised that there aren't already similar agreements for people from the States visiting Europe.

you're right. Three's new ToU and Fair Use policy sets a monthly cap of 1,000GB/month, which equates to you saturating your perfect conditions 3G connection 24/7. By that logic, in everyday use it is IMPOSSIBLE to exceed this cap. I've never managed it, and I've burned phones out (not to mention at least two mobile relays).

http://www.three.co.uk/Privacy...

If you can't be arsed clicking:

"Terms & Conditions.
> All-you-can-eat explained

All-you-can-eat data.
If you have All-you-can-eat data units as part of your package or with an Add-on, there are no hidden ‘fair use policies’ within the UK. If you’re in a Feel At Home destination, you can use up to 25,600 data units (which converts into 25 GB of data as 1 data unit converts automatically on use into 1MB of data) each month. All-you-can-eat data units should give you all the access to the internet you would normally need, without worrying about hefty bills. It’s worth noting that even if you used your phone for every minute of every day you’d only use, subject to TrafficSense, around 1,000 GB each month. That’s why we’ve set a usage cap at 1,000 GB, in order to identify commercial use of the service, for example, which is not permitted under the Terms for Three Services.

All-you-can-eat texts and minutes.
There’s no hidden “fair use policies” with our All-you-can-eat text units or voice units allowances either when in the UK – we just ask that you use this allowance in accordance with our Terms for Three Services – that is, for personal use only, and not for any illegal, commercial or improper purposes. In addition to these All-you-can-eat UK allowances, you also get 5,000 text units and 3,000 voice units to use respectively each month, when in a Feel At Home destination, which convert respectively into 5,000 text messages back to the UK and 3,000 minutes of calls to UK landline and mobile numbers."

FYI, Feel At Home is a worldwide roaming allowance, available on all price plans.

If phones were portable between networks, then multi-network compatible phones are actually worth selling and will show up in stores

That's already the case in the UK. Note the 'unlocked' option in the Network dropdown and the premium it brings to the price.

An unlocked GSM phone can be used with a local SIM card (so no roaming charges) anywhere in Europe, and, in the UK at least, you can buy a pay-as-you-go SIM card for less than a dollar.

Or a month's unlimited data for $25. And interestingly (for this topic) a 3UK SIM can be used in a handful of countries without roaming charges - including the USA (but data's limited to 25 gigabytes per month and you're not allowed to tether.)

If phones were portable between networks, then multi-network compatible phones are actually worth selling and will show up in stores

That's already the case in the UK. Note the 'unlocked' option in the Network dropdown and the premium it brings to the price.

An unlocked GSM phone can be used with a local SIM card (so no roaming charges) anywhere in Europe, and, in the UK at least, you can buy a pay-as-you-go SIM card for less than a dollar.

Or a month's unlimited data for $25. And interestingly (for this topic) a 3UK SIM can be used in a handful of countries without roaming charges - including the USA (but data's limited to 25 gigabytes per month and you're not allowed to tether.)

She should get herself a Three UK SIM on contract or pay-as-you-go (with all-you-can-eat data) and when she visits back to the USA she can put the SIM in a US-compatible phone, call her friends in the UK and be billed as if she were in the UK.

Three UK give you 4G for the same price as 3G. Her best bet is probably to get a pay-as-you-go SIM. But first she should check that the location she will be in gets sufficient coverage, which she can do here. She should be able to find everything she needs at this link.

Three UK give you 4G for the same price as 3G. Her best bet is probably to get a pay-as-you-go SIM. But first she should check that the location she will be in gets sufficient coverage, which she can do here. She should be able to find everything she needs at this link.

ALSO.. for trips the the USA ..... this is handy http://www.three.co.uk/Discove...

all data usage and calls to and from the UK FREE .. well as covered by your package.
Saved me a fair few bucks on my travels between Edinburgh, here in Scotland and Denver and Houston at Easter.

They never thought of ending roaming charges as a way to _make_ money

Except for Three UK who have already ended call roaming charges in eleven foreign countries - including the USA.

And for certain packages they've removed data roaming charges too (subject to limits.)

Incidentally 97 percent of their network traffic is data.

and I should refer you to the Three provider's PaYG sims that currently offer a tariff of 1 penny per megabyte, or the £15 deal that gives you unlimited data.

and I should refer you to the Three provider's PaYG sims that currently offer a tariff of 1 penny per megabyte, or the £15 deal that gives you unlimited data.

Several of my friends from all over the UK switched to Three.co.uk in the last few months, and we met on holiday in Germany last week. They all complained that Three made it difficult to activate international roaming, and had excessive international charges (the maximum permitted by the EU by default, and poor deals) and a crap call centre.

Having read some of the posts on this article, I'm less annoyed with Three. My contract costs £6.90/month, for 500MB data and 200 minutes.

I think that's exactly what my friends have, but I went one step further and got £40 cashback by finding a deal online.

(I'm using a fairly old smartphone, an HTC Desire. It's probably time to upgrade, but I don't like throwing out mostly-working electronics.)

Yes, I am on Three, also with unlimited data. Their support page tells you about it.

Three barely works where I live.

Three works fairly well wherever I go within the United Kingdom (and I do travel frequently). Coverage map looks like it supports the majority of the UK too.

I don't know ANYONE who uses it.

I know a few.

No, I'm not in London.

Neither am I.

You seem to forget that in the UK the word "unlimited" does not actually mean unlimited when it comes to bandwidth in internet connections. It means "some arbitary amount that we're nto going to tell you about in advance".

Not so in one case. Three offer unlimited plans that are actually unlimited. When buying I asked specifically about fair use policies, hidden caps, soft caps and all came back negative. Granted, this was a sales rep, but he was quite earnest about their network backbone - they seem to take pride in building a network with the capacity to offer what is advertised.

I have no affiliation with Three other than being a happy customer - I even used my tethered phone for a couple months before I had a wired internet connection set up.

http://www.three.co.uk/Discover/Phones/Goodbye_data_limits_Hello_Three ive used about 30GB one month! theyre cool with tethering too - so im sometimes away from home sharing the data to my laptop, ipad etc. good speed too...about 2mbit down

http://www.three.co.uk/
a mobile phone operator in the UK

In the UK, one company is offering a tariff plan with unlimited data (including tethering) for about $40 per month. They have been cleaning up. (In my case I think I've hit 5GB download today, but I am running a number of software updates.)

Another company is offering an unlimited data plan for about $15, but you are not allowed to tether (which I find key).

Seriously you need to get some decent competition over there.

Yes, unsurprisingly 2G coverage is better than 3G coverage. All UK networks will fall back to 2G when 3G is unavailable, with the exception of 3, who don't have a 2G network. Their customers used to be able to roam onto Orange 2G, but that's slowly being turned off.

Unless you live in the UK, where "unlimited" can mean LESS than a competitor's cheapest "limited" package.

This is nothing. Compare to this: £9.99 down, £18/month for a new Samsung netbook with 3G dataplan.
http://threestore.three.co.uk/dealsummary.aspx?offercode=24LP1GD031
Standard UK government grandstanding and soundbytes. The only reason they're offering this is because a) it makes good media coverage, and b) someone is making a profit out of it.

Time to laugh of all my friends that are now trying to use Skype! (soon I'll be receiving messages through MSN - not IRC or GTalk - asking why Skype stopped working)

Please let me know when a phone provider like my current one (Three) provides unlimited free usage of 'Ekiga' over their network without even requiring an Internet plan like Skype does and offers something similar to "Skype access", which I'm using at this very moment in Glasgow airport as I wait for my plane.

I see that 3 UK are offering 15 GB for £15 a month.

> built-in active noise reduction

That has been a feature of the Nexus One since January.
Apple quietly implement such features (compass is another example), but are very loud indeed when other people implement features they consider theirs.
 
Here in the UK, video calling was being promoted by a cellular carrier about 5 years ago.
Expensive, though. I'd love it to be mainstream. I think it would indeed be a killer feature.

I would thoroughly recommend the three UK MiFi modem, if you have an iPhone or smartphone with wifi capability, then you can get data access on the go without being ripped off.

The details are here:
http://www.three.co.uk/Mobile_Broadband/MiFi

Get the basic top-up which includes 3GB.

Once you are finished with it, sell it on ebay, or try to get it unlocked.

I have one for when I travel to the UK for work, and I have only had it out of coverage once.

Phil

I disagree with that. I live in a rural part of Hampshire, I used to use O2, but I switched to Three for better speeds.

The Register had an article in July with the coverage maps for different mobile companies; Three and Orange came out best.

For a tourist, I'd suggest that Three's pay-and-go dongle would be the best option.

I disagree with that. I live in a rural part of Hampshire, I used to use O2, but I switched to Three for better speeds.

The Register had an article in July with the coverage maps for different mobile companies; Three and Orange came out best.

For a tourist, I'd suggest that Three's pay-and-go dongle would be the best option.

Don't get the one from 3 Mobile Broadband. It's dirt cheap - because the coverage is poor outside central cities.

Not true - all the operators allow you this returns policy. My point stands - there is very little difference between the packages and O2's network sucks. Not going to do your homework for you, but as an example: 3G states 14 day money back guarantee here: http://threestore.three.co.uk/broadband/?id=1397

A mobile broadband package with a 15GB cap only costs £15/month if you're willing to put up with a 24-month contract. You could get two of those and have a combined 30GB/month cap and still be paying less than the £42 you seem to think is normal.

Here's a humble guess, a hope and another guess:

• Within the next 25 years, cellphones will become at least twice as fast.

That long? More like 2 years or 18 months (aka Moore's law applied to cell phones). It's not that difficult, but places a strain on the battery and heat dissipation.

At least one person, someone, somewhere, who has the power to decide these things, will get the brilliant and innovative idea of putting a frigging NTP client on a phone so I don't have to set the clock myself [and adjust for DST]. Heck, maybe it can be NTP++ that uses GPS info to determine my timezone too.

Re-write this to "Networks should wake up and enable time synch" - it's a feature within GSM and has been for a while. Many's the time I've roamed and had my clock updated. Many's the time I've returned home and had to do it manually.

We will all move to using skype instead of voice calls and twitter instead of SMS. Or perhaps Google Talk and email, but that's probably just me being naive and wishful.

Try this network then

Each VOIP call uses less bandwidth than a voice call, so it's a transition to get people to do this. You still have a monthly contract, so expect the price of that to go up as people use it more...

Nope. http://threestore.three.co.uk/payg/default.aspx clearly shows these phones NOT on contract which have free skype calls. And it's being marketed as FREE CALLS FOREVER (so don't expect any price to appear). Three is a pretty cool company.

But I don't think that really represents the business model. Most 'unlimited' tariffs actually are limited, by so-called fair use. In the UK, the three network offers 'unlimited' internet on smartphones like the Nokia E63, but the fair use clause is actually 1Gb per month. They also are probably the most popular network for mobile broadband via USB dongles, for which 1Gb of data costs £10 per month. What's really interesting is that the fair use 'unlimited' internet on the Nokia is £5 per month.

Now is possible that 'probably' the USB dongle will get more use, but ultimately if they've sold a Gb, they've sold a Gb, so how can they justify charging double for the dongle data? That seems to me a bit like a restaurant that has a salad cart selling you a massive bowl that you can fill only once, but then trying to charge again if you share that bowl. (Interestingly enough, in the UK, if you register a three SIM using a smartphone, you can then swap it out into a USB dongle and get half-price Internet).

As I'm from Britain, I looked at Three, T-Mobile, O2, Orange, and Vodafone.

The ones you link to are CDMA modems, which only work in US, Canada and one or two other countries. The rest of the world uses GSM based networks, and the modems for them are USB.

Actually, first hand experience of making calls over 3G (HSDPA) packet data connections using Fring on Three shows that call quality is terrible. Admittedly this was in central London, where cells may be quite heavily contended, but once people actually start using 3G you can quite regularly see bursts of latency - causing the throughput to go through the floor.

You get a guaranteed QoS with a proper voice call. You do not with packet data. In fact, Three's own "Skype" service is based on iSkoot, which does uses packet data for getting the contact list, setting up a call etc - but it actually carries calls over a proper voice channel.

As for push email, I guess if you need to know instantly when email messages have been sent to you, it might be useful. That probably describes less than 5% of the email using public though.

From the perspective of not having push messaging, having it may seem pointless. From the perspective of having push messaging, not having it is infuriating. Apple has the right idea about improving users' workflow (à la visual voicemail), but users will react badly to being told that an element of their workflow "isn't that important", as it is taken away from them.

I agree with you that MMS and SMS should die a death, but as long as my contract has inclusive SMS and MMS then I will use it. And stripping functionality from a phone is not the way to achieve said death if the alternatives aren't equivalent. Email and IM only work in place of MMS and SMS if the recipient has those things set up on their phone, which in the consumer market is still rare. On top of that, you'd be moving away from a situation where the sender pays (in Europe anyway) to a situation where both sides pay, and I think data prices need to drop further still in order to accommodate that.

Long term, I'd love to see a situation where mobile networks act as ISPs and all mobile services are IP-based, but I think that's still a long way off. The networks will cling to their expensive products until a competitor comes along and offers the better option (up until recently I would've cited 3 as an example of such a competitor, having released a Skype phone, but I had a very bad experience with them today and am loathe to recommend them).

The Sony Ericsson k530i I have now is quite nice, and I got it for no additional cost on the cheapest contract "3" (three.co.uk) do. It's a bit thinner than the old T610, drops the IR support and adds a nicer screen, 3G, an M2 card slot and MP3 and MP4 support.
(OT: Did I just use three "and" in one sentence?)

Mine had MSN messenger and Skype preloaded on it (Skype via 3G, no wifi unfortunately, but Skype and MSN are free to use even without taking the internet option because "3"'s generous), and it has its own pretty decent browser (pretty similar to opera mini, which also runs on it). It also has an RSS reader?

It can be used as a high-speed 3G modem via bluetooth and usb (may be useful if you use a laptop?)

I don't think the T610 could multi-task either, on this I can run MSN messenger, Skype, the music player and browse the web all at once.

Though if you are happy with your T610, I'm sure you could find a replacement battery for it that lasted a bit longer.

In Hungary this become a normal practice.

At first they will cut some extreme users lines without any notice,
and then they will change the contract, that if you have more than
~150G usage per month, than that's not fair use, and they will cut
the user off, and they will still use the unlimited in the AD's.

The same story:
http://three.co.uk/xseries/fair_use_policy.omp

Unlimited Data - Fair Use Limit: 1 GB each month
Unlimited Windows Live Messenger - Fair Use Limit: 10,000 messages each month
Unlimited Skype to Skype calls - Fair Use Limit: 5,000 minutes each month ....

Does PAYG not exist in the US or something?

I can buy a mobile for as little as £20 from the supermarket and just pay for my calls on it. The minimum is often pretty teeny, like less than £20 a year.

Here for instance.. Cheapest phone is £29.99 with £20 in free calls. It's not an Apple iphone (of course) but it does mean it's entirely legit to include the cost of a forced contract in the phone price.

Hell you can get a 3g Video mobile with a camera for £34.99 including £30 in free calls from here.

If a phone is only available on contract it's not "scaremongering" to include the contract in the price. I accept things may be different in the US.

Haven't three just started an "unlimted" data service in the UK? They call it X-series

Seems there's some level of Yahoo, Google and Skype integration in there too. In fact, when iPhone launches in the UK, I rather hope it'll be available on x-series.

In Soviet Britain they pay YOU to receive calls...

http://www.three.co.uk/priceplans/PAYGwepay.omp

Um..

In Great Soviet Britain, operator pays YOU!

http://www.three.co.uk/priceplans/PAYGwepay.omp

No really.

The original G3 network in the UK, 3, originally sold the service on the ability to video conference on phones. That was at least a couple of years ago.

Typing each of the first ten numerals into google gives:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

He'll be with 3. Cheap, but no web browsing, and (in my experience), appalling customer service.