It has no sense (looking at the terrible tariff), but today I bought a CoopVoce sim-card, just to have the 1st Italian MVNO simcard! :D

http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y3/...oopeffendi.jpg

It works on 3G as well, as you can see, but no videocalls and data rates are the same (expensive) as TIM, without any data option.

but the special offer at the moment looks quite good. They seem to give you a lot of bonus when recharging the SIM-cards (if you recharge 20 euro you end up at 44 euro). Then the tariff looks quite nice too :)

http://www.e-coop.it/portalWeb/portl...oce&history=no

The tariff is ugly, it's just a LongTIM rebranded, which is a 15cent/min billed per minute plus a 15 cent set-up fee. International rates are awful (with 31 cent setup fee!), SMS are 15 cents again (30 to foreign numbers), data is 0.6cent/KB. There's nothing convenient.

The offer of 44 euros with a 20 euro card is only for MNP, if you buy a new number you just get 20% more on each refill.

Ah, OK. Then my italian was too limited to get the sophisticated details. I thought anybody would get this offer now...

Chris

I forgot: if you get a new number you also get free 10€ refill card (which includes 12€ of credit). So in any case the deal is not bad since you pay 5 and you get 17... at an anwful tariff, but at least I have the first Italian MVNO! :P

And today also UNO Mobile started! :D The tariff is not so bad, but the 60/1 billing, for the first time in Italy, is not so nice... they have anyway some interesting international roaming rates...

This "1" in in the circle is the logo of a "private label" of Carrefour, I guess :) (and something like Belgian 1 Mobile http://www.prepaidgsm.net/en/belgio/1mobile.html). This logo resembles me food-like low-cost products from Carrefours - just a quick impression :).

As to the tariff, all the international calls are for 50 cents (no special surcharges for exotic destination like Noth Korea, Kiribati or Liechtenstein :-P).
And the roaming tariff is "Tariffa dall'estero", right? It seems to match the latest EU price regulations with one exception - incoming calls in Romania are for 1€/min. it's interesting that calls from Zona 1 are by 1 cent cheaper that international calls from Italy :)

Yes, UNO mobile is a Carrefour Italia subsidiary.

"Tariffa dall'estero" literally means "Tariff from abroad" so you're right. ;-)
There are two exceptions in the EU: Romania (as you told) and Bulgaria (where calling costs 2€ per minute and receiving a call costs 1.5€ per minute - really expensive!).

Yes, I had an impression that missed one more EU country but it was late when I was typing the previous post :). Of course, Romania and Bulgaria are the newest EU countries but I don't think they are excluded from any telecom regulations - in other words - those rates will have to go down.

Someone told me that there will be plenty of MVNOs starting up in Italy this coming October - is this a true rumour? :)

BTW, do Italian sim cards still get bonus on incoming SMS?