O2 pay-as-you-go iPhone plans announced, un-announced

That 'omitted pricing' page, is just what has been up for a while now. So they obviously were doing some updates, and the priced site probs was a test/fail of some kind.

Same with Vodafone India.

See: www.vodafone.in

An easier way of working it out.

Contract:
On £35/month tariff, total cost for 16GB is £789
On £45/month tariff, dropping to £35 after month 9, cost for 16GB is £779
On PAYG, cost of phone plus 12 months of extra data is £480 without any call allowance.

So if you make less than £16.66 per calls on your curreny PAYG then you are better to go PAYG. More than this and better to go for contract. Also don't forget that contract gets you a lot more inclusive minutes for your money.

Typical!
Why do you people take this abuse?



http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com

That's a lot better than I expected. Only £30 ($60) more than the original iPhone was selling for a matter of months ago, and that had a contract attached (in theory, at least). This almost puts it in my price range (I'm unlocked and on a dirt-cheap Vodafone contract, gagging to upgrade my painful GPRS access to 3G...)

...Why can't AT&T have a pay-as-you-go iPhone plan Stateside? -_-

This sounds about right to me, too.

Incidentally, the linked article is wrong about how PAYG works in the UK - it doesn't allow "users to eschew a contract for a monthly “top-up” fee that provides a specified number of prepaid minutes and text messages." You prepay the money, only, so you have a certain amount of credit on the account. This is expressed in monetary terms - e.g. £4.67 - and you can "top-up" by certain amounts, usually between £10 and £50. Then you'd pay something like 20p per minute for a phone call, and 10p for a text. You also see tariffs where you'd pay 25p/min for the first 3 minutes of outbound calls of the day, then after that it drops to 5p/min for the rest of the day. Remember that in the US, you're very much in the minority having to pay to receive mobile calls under normal circumstances. We can go months (years perhaps, although I've never been unpopular for long enough to have tested that out :-P) without topping up, although usually you would have to have a chargeable event every so often for the account to remain active, otherwise you'd probably lose your number. This can include receiving a call, as although mobile users don't pay to receive calls, we have entirely separate non-geographic area codes for mobiles which the calling party usually pays more per minute to call than a landline.

So, if one could conceivably have a mobile phone which they never top up, how does the network try to have their customers top up regularly? The answer, to a European at least, is very simple - offer extras which are paid out of the pre-paid balance every month, or incentives which require a minimum top-up every month but don't come out of the balance.

O2 call paid extras Bolt Ons™, and the £10 browsing and WiFi is an example of this. Incidentally, O2 offer a Web Bolt On for £7.50/month, but this doesn't include WiFi.

Incentive based extras are usually separate tariffs, so you can't have more than one active at a time, and the size of the allowance is based on how much you top up (although as noted earlier, you're not charged for the allowance and the full balance remains available for out of allowance services). O2 have a number of these, such as a tariff which offers a certain amount of free off-peak calls, and one which offers a certain amount of free texts.

Despite the fact that PAYG these days is fairly good value, many users will find a pay monthly contract better for them - not least because you get a free or heavily subsidised phone in exchange for signing your soul over to them for 18 months!

Sam

Very promising stuff if it all is as it says above... The 6 month thing is new to me and the wi-fi / 3g after that should be £12.50 as a bolt on and yes, usual payg rates apply. free visual voice mail too if i am to be believed,

The page says that more information "will be available shortly so come back in a few days."

The O2 site has said this since the WWDC - longest "few days" of my life!

Assuming it's real then it sounds about right when compared to other phones. The 6 months internet is especially generous. The thing is, iPhone and the web are practically joined at the hip so when the free internet runs out you would start spending a fortune on topping up the credit.

If it isn't real then erase that last paragraph from your memory