Toggle Mobile

[ChrisNeedsToKnow]

Hi bourbonkiller,

in general their left hand doesn´t seem to know what the right hand is doing.

See Belgian numbers (discussed a little earlier in this thread). Toggle actively promised they´d be available "in two weeks" at some stage. That was roughly 3 months ago, and so far: nothing!

I wouldn´t count on what their customer service guys say. I´m not saying it´s the agent´s fault (it´s not), but rather their internal communication seems to be non-existant.

Hence, while actually recommending this product to my friends, I always warn everyone to accept this card "as is", not counting on its reliability and always assuming it could go offline at any time.

It´s a pity, as the underlying idea is really great. But their approach leaves me worried enough not to turn this into my 1-and-only main SIM (unfortunately).

Rgds, Christian

[peterdoo]

Originally Posted by inquisitor

It's interesting and new to me that phones are indeed cycling through all the IMSIs. Such trial-and-error method would mean the phone just tries to register with all the IMSIs and the HLR, which in such scenario has to know from which country each subscriber has an IMSI, then decides whether to allow registration or refuse it. Can you say for how long your Android phone sticks to each IMSI?

In a non-toggle country the Android phone first tries the Lyca UK IMSI. After about 30 seconds (all networks refused registration in that time?) it switches to the Vodafone NL roaming IMSI. It then takes about 105 seconds until the phone registers into the preferred Vodafone partner network. It seems to me that the timeout is not fix, but somehow depends on the time the phone needs to try registration in the available networks and receives rejects from them or times out.

I have also noticed once that while a data connection was established on the phone, the balance displayed on the toggle web site seemed to be about 9 £ lower than it should have been. After ending the data connection, the balance has been restored to the correct one lowered only by the amount used for data transferred. It seems that they temporary reserve an amount for few MB of data.

Here are the smallest amounts I have seen being charged for data connections:
Non-toggle-EU (0,67£/MB): 0,0007 £. Charging interval seems to be 1K.
Toggle (0,15£/MB): 0,0146 £. Charging interval seems to be 100K.

[ronwi]

I haven't used my toggle SIM for a while, and I just put it in my phone here in the US in anticipation of a trip.

I received a text with my local US number. I din't think I had a US number active on the account, and when I looked online I saw that the number was registered today. So it appears that under certain circumstances Toggle will automatically provision a number if you register in a country in which Toggle has numbers.

An unrelated question - anyone know a way to top up less that £20?

Correction: I just looked in the SIM Tookit that Toggle puts on the phone. The SIM was manually selected to the US. I think I once had a US number on the SIM a few months ago, and did the manual selection because I was having problems. So, the SIM had the US IMSI manually selected when I turned the phone on, and that must have forced the re-provision of a number (one thing I am certain of is that I haven't used the SIM for months and the web page shows a new US number registered today.)

[andy]

My experience has been that the IMSI selection was automatic to begin with, but I've needed to do it manually more recently

However, seeing comments above I'm now thinking about which phones were used

Certainly more recently it's been in a Nokia E51. Maybe I didn't have the problem to begin with in a Nokia X6. Maybe a check when my sister brings it back in a week's time ...

[inquisitor]

Last week I stayed in London for two days. Subscribing to the 2GB data pack (£10) for exclusive use in the UK by dialing *141*1000# (a so-called USSD command) worked flawlessly even though I activated it already from Germany while using the German IMSI. During the USSD operation I was also informed that the data pack is subject to auto-renewal unless cancelled by dialing *190# (if I remember properly). Cancellation went smoothly as well. However there was no text message that would explicitly inform me of the data pack being active, which left me in doubt in that regard.

After arriving at Heathrow on Wednesday my Zopo ZP980 didn't register on the network for ages so I finally switched IMSIs manually after which I immediately had a signal. The same happened, by the way, when I arrived in Frankfurt coming from a non-toggle EU country earlier that day, where the Dutch Vodafone IMSI was used last. Unfortunately I couldn't check which IMSI was in use and whether IMSIs were automatically switched at all because none of the Android apps that reveal your IMSI supports dual SIM phones yet and instead only show the IMSI of your primary SIM while the toggle SIM was residing on the second SIM slot and I had no time to swap them. However I would rather blame my exotic phone's possibly buggy STK implementation for the failure to register than toggle.

Data rates in the UK, where toggle uses the O2 network, were quite disappointing as I rarely saw bandwidth surpassing 1 MBit/s. At Liverpool Station the network was totally congested causing a packet loss of >90% so Internet access was simply impossible. However my observations are not representative as my phone does not support UMTS900, of which O2 makes extensive use in London, so it was sticked to potentially overloaded UMTS2100 cells.

To my disappointment I experienced a total data outage on Thursday morning for some 4h when I actually needed Internet access most. After informing customer care at 8:46h data was available again at about 11:15h and at 12:10h I was called back by a support agent who made sure the issue was resolved. From what I can say customer support quality is pretty well.

Further shortcomings of toggle's British data packs are:

• no possibility to check data consumption or validiy of data pack
• data pack purchases are not listed in the call records (you virtually cannot comprehend billing)
• you cannot see data pack susbcription on the online customer portal
• data packs cannot be activated or cancelled from the online customer portal

[tux]

Lycamobile Italy has officially launched its Full MVNO activities on the Vodafone network. Maybe sometime in the future they'll add Italy as a 'local rates' country on Toggle Mobile. (Lyca numbers start with (+39) 351, as I told you in my previous posts)

[peterdoo]

Apparently Lycamobile hopes to launch in eight further markets by February 2014, including Canada and countries across Latin America and Asia.

Probably shouldn't take the date too seriously, but there will be more countries.

Just had a case recently that somebody simply returned a call to my UK toggle number displayed on his phone instead of dialing a local number. Caused him quite high bill. Since then I always try to ask callers whether they are calling a local number. Hopefully toggle will be at some time able to arrange for a local number to be displayed when calling numbers in that country.

[tux]

Just FYI: https://twitter.com/ToggleMobile/sta...78202922979329

[inquisitor]

Anyone else seeing crippled caller IDs for incoming calls on the US number? When I receive calls from Germany on my American number the international code is being omitted.
E.g. a German caller with the MSISDN +49 157 12345678 is shown as +1 57 12345678 on my phone.

[ChrisNeedsToKnow]

Hi inquisitor,

just tested for you. I receive calls from Switzerland on togglemobile just fine (for example +41761234567).

Did anyone manage to register a Belgian number?

Rgds,
Christian