New data offer by TIM
 

At last also TIM has now a new data plan with "unlimited" surfing which is, in fact, called "Internet Senza Limiti".

Actually it has limits, of course:
- 10GB of surfing
- 64Kbps speed limited after you use your bundle
- € 24.00/month on prepaid, € 19.00/month on postpaid
- activation cost of € 5.00

You can get cheaper rates if you pay 1 year in advance, i.e. € 189,00 including 12 months of navigation and a 7.2Mbps usb bundle.
Another offer is when you buy an usb bundle (starting from € 29.00) you get 3 months at 10€/month.

It's not bad, but still COOP Voce's offer is cheaper (18€ for 5GB), but you pay the extra bundle which is also half the one offered by TIM.

Wind is still cheaper (20€ for 10GB, now in offer at 10€ for 1 year) but has worse 3G coverage.

Prepaid TIM card
 

Just returned from 14 day stay in Italy. I have two Nokia e71 phones. I was able to purchase a Tim card for each for 10 euros (~$14). This allowed me 5 euros worth of calling - .04 euro per minute with .16 connect charge (.20 1st minute and .04 rest of minutes) and unlimited data. TIM was excellent in all parts of Italy I visited - Rome, Cassino Sant' Elia, Sorrento, Amalfi Coast, Isle of Capri, etc. Both my phones have Joku app which allowed them to act a WiFi for my Ipod Touch and friends laptop.

Grazie, Effendi -- that's great news. I'm going to be in Piemonte for a few months, staying in Alba. My wife has a TIM card, so I wanted to get TIM as well so I can take advantage of the TIMx2 plan (€2/mo, then unlimited calls/texts to ONE other TIM number). But I'd also need an "unlimited" (I guess unlimited means 10GB) data plan, and their only "unlimited" data plan was the 100 hours a month plan, in 15-minute increments. That's a horrible way to go about it. I assume the new one, "Internet Senza Limiti", is just 10GB of bandwidth per month, and not based on time-slices.

Thanks for the help.
-Goffredo

Yes, it's 10GB per month. If you use more you just go slowly but keep on using it without paying anything more.

How do i activate this new plan?
i text PRO INTERNETSENZALIMITI to 40916 ? Ok to use in a android smartphone?

Also for TIMxSMARTPHONE is it still unlimited data? Other places i read it says its 250mb now.

Yes, it's PRO INTERNETSENZALIMITI to 40916.
I confirm that TIMxSMARTPHONE has a 250MB weekly bundle, I corrected my page, sorry for my mistake.

Data activation delay
 

In reading the posts here it sounds like when activating a data plan the confirmation can take several hours. Do smart phone users need to disable internet access while waiting to avoid inadvertently running up charges?

On TIM, it took be about 30 minutes for the activation to happen with Internet Senza Limita.

Yes, usually it's fast, but sometimes it can take some hours (or days...). Of course it's better to disable data usage before it's active.