OT: UK Contract Plan Including Mobile to Mobile Minutes
 

I'm trying to help my best friend buy a UK contract SIM for his son. We got into a minor fight today concerning UK mobiles to mobile minutes.

Traditionally, it has always been cheaper to call someone on the same network (e.g. Orange to Orange, Tmobile to Tmobile, etc). Recently, you've seen many plans come out which include a certain bucket of mobile to mobile minutes. This is where I potentially got myself in trouble.

I had previously told my friend that he should wait until his son started secondary school to see what provider was the most common with his kid's friends. (His son is going to an independent school so the friends will be different from those in his primary school).

My friend argues that because of the newer mobile to mobile plans, there is no incentive to stay with the provider that the majority of students are using. Is he correct?

Thanks.

In the UK, it is normal for cross network calls to be more expensive than same network calls. However, contract SIMs now typically only have cross network minutes bundles included (ie mine has 250minutes of cross network calls included). Text messages are the same price always regardless of the network, but again you can get bundles on most contracts that make these cheaper.

Providing your friends son doesn't exceed the free minutes included, the network you choose wont matter, just get the best price plan for you.

Thanks for responding. We both understood that. The question is whether calls to someone else on his home network come out of his cross-network bundle (originally) or his regular bucket. For example, suppose he selects 3 as his carrier because five of his schoolmates are on 3. Will calls to these other 3 uses come out of his cross-network bundle or his larger bucket of calls to landlines?

Contracts with only the same network and landlines have tended to fade away over the last few years, to the point where if there's just the one set of minutes defined, they will all be cross-network, so for simple contracts your friend is right.

Subsidiary bundles have also been appearing, but perhaps mainly as bonuses on more expensive contracts, particularly as more free calls to the same network or to landlines. O2 do this sort of thing, or some Orange options

On 3 contracts, or their very similar payg bundles, there is a bundle to cross-network and landlines, with 300 extra minutes to call 3. So calls to 3 would use these first then the main bundle

But without those extra complications, and if not needing really lots of minutes, I'd say broadly similar cross-network packages is a reasonable approximation

There are some differences between contracts in the shops and online - it seems to be possible to get more minutes by going direct. Or there are short notice contracts without a phone, starting at typically ~200 minutes for £15. But of course kids and teenagers might want trendy new phones all the time ...

Other considerations are cashback deals, where the dealer rebates part of or even more than their commission, but they're a bit in disrepute as some dealers have gone broke by bad underwriting of just what proportion of customers will remember to send back instalment claims (e.g. 6 vouchers to send in over 18 months, at which point I gave up). I really wouldn't recommend this though for someone unwilling to devote time to boring study of which dealers are reliable and then good self-reminders

At the moment, 3's 1100 minutes or texts deal (plus the 300 minutes to 3, plus free Skype calls on suitable phones), currently reduced to £20 a month, looks more than most people would ever need.