Simyo Spain €5/month data (upto 500MB)

[gaidal]

I'd like to warn everyone against this one.

Firstly, as the previous poster said it seems to be gprs only and is pretty slow, although I do get a 3G symbol outdoors. But that's not what makes me disappointed because if you look closely it doesn't say anything about speed for the €5 plan, only the €24.99 one.

I've had it for 5 days on my iPhone and used 20 + 4 mb (down + up), and for this they've charged me €6.11! The tariff on the website that sounds so good isn't what they're actually using, they charge for every connection up to at least €0.99 + tax or more per day, even if I'm only using 1 mb in total. This wouldn't have mattered if it actually stopped at €5 but it doesn't.

I had a Spanish speaking friend call the customer service, the first two times to find out if they meant €5 maximum per day or per month, and the first and second person told her different things. The third time was a few days later, to find out why they charge me so much: They clearly tried to talk themselves out of it, letting her talk to different people, having her wait, and in between giving random explanations that were a joke, such as "look at this session at this date and time, you got it for free because you had reached the limit right?" or "well this plan is not meant for downloading, only for simple stuff like checking your e-mail, it might be better if you don't use it a lot...". As I said I had only used 20 mb down in 5 days. Do they think it's still 1999 or what?
When we threatened to report them to a consumer rights organization they finally said that they would look into it (after 30 min) but didn't offer anything immediately, not even a reference number until my friend demanded it.
What a customer service, it's like the wild west. :P

It's kind of sad isn't it, because simyo's 500 mb for €5 would have been the cheapest Spanish data plan by far, had it been true!

Or has anyone had it work for them?

[laptopnomad]

Thanks so much for sharing!

I can relate to the experience - not getting to what's being promised and then trying to work a local helpdesk to get the truth out. As i experienced so many times, DATA plans are not understood well enough by local helpdesks.

As it seems to me Simyo has several problems to solve here. Foremost education & training of the helpdesk.

Because the 500Mb was way to small for me, I choose Yoigo - so far so good - knock on wood.

It gives me 3.1Gb of 3G for € 93,- (ex tax) a month with a daily limit of 100 Mb - after which speeds drops to GPRS alike. It's not the cheapest I know.

So a bit of my helpdesk experience:
Yoigo has AFAIK three English speaking operators - all 3 know the DATA plan well enough to help Internet savvy heavy users. Their e-mail response in English is within 36 hours.

And yes, there are (rural) parts of Spain that are still GPRS only, of course depending on the cellphone network. I got a few as well.

So this place PrePaidGSM is the only place I know where to get a bit of feedback on the actual quality of 3G operators.
It's not all about the price IMHO, also the (underlying) network and the people who run the helpdesk.

My biggest problem was to get what i wanted in the local phone shop in a language i don't speak.

Here's my experience.

[petkow]

Originally Posted by laptopnomad

It gives me 3.1Gb of 3G for € 93,- (ex tax) a month with a daily limit of 100 Mb - after which speeds drops to GPRS alike. It's not the cheapest I know.

Again, apologies for this revival of this old thread but WTF!!! I am just stunned at this rate!! How do Yoigo charge 100 odd euros (with tax) for 3 Gig of data??!! That has to be the poorest value I have ever heard of in Spain.