Toggle Mobile

[ChrisNeedsToKnow]

Originally Posted by MBK

According to your border crossing experience, is the automatic country selection working fine, or do think it is still better to select the country manually in the toggle menu?

I usually use the Toggle SIM in a Nokia C2-00 dual-sim phone. Old and crappy, but just fine for making/receiving calls.

When setting it to "automatic" (both IMSI-select and network select), whether in the border area or not, the phone loses its battery very quickly. Possibly because it constantly monitors networks?

As such I set the SIM to "manual", and "network select" to "manual" as well.

When manually selecting a new IMSI on the SIM, the phone crashes. I got used to this and just select and then immediately reboot.

I wish to have this automated, but I got used to it and selecting/rebooting takes 30 seconds each time.

Rgds, Christian

PS - Belgian numbers still not available.

[inquisitor]

From my understanding the STK application on toggle SIMs works completely passively as there's no method to actively scan for networks in the STK standard and so it can't really drain your battery.
Instead the process works as follows: As soon as your phone loses its signal and tries to reselect another network it will submit the MCC/MNC-tuple of the found network to the SIM as part of the authentication process. Now if the MCC is from a country the SIM has another IMSI from it simply switches IMSIs. So it's a completely passive process.
I would rather assume that the obviously buggy STK implementation of your handset is responsible for the battery drain.
Have you actually checked for a firmware update for your phone?

[peterdoo]

On my C2-00 (V03.99), when manually selecting a new IMSI on the SIM, the phone initially crashed as well. However since some time, this crashing stopped. Now I can switch IMSIs just normally. I don't know whether this has to do with an OTA update of the SIM, adding/removing local numbers or simply with the fact that since I had to change my SIMs to micro SIM format, I can only use one SIM in the phone.

Nevertheless I normally keep IMSI selected manually. Using automatic mode causes the phone to be disconnected from the network for longer time after passing through a spot without the coverage. It seems like the phone is going through a long procedure before returning to the IMSI valid for the location. Also the initial registration may take more than 10 minutes.

When a toggle SIM is in an Android phone where the current IMSI in use can be displayed, one can observe the phone cycling through all the IMSIs available on the SIM. There is certainly no UK/US network coverage in Germany that would be necessary to reach those IMSIs in the way inquisitor described it.

[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. It would also mean the registration process will take longer the more IMSIs you have. Is that the reason why toggle SIMs are limited to 9 IMSIs? Can you say for how long your Android phone sticks to each IMSI?

[ErWeeBee]

Searching for a prepaid GSM SIM, especially for use in and between Germany, Netherlands and Switzerland, I discovered this thread and read quite a lot of it. I still have some questions, in particular because Toggle is still developing, apparently.
If I decide to buy a Toggle SIM I'd like to have and keep IMSI in all three countries: D, CH and NL.
1: As far as I've understood it should be possible then to use Data automatically in all three countries after having applied for that once and as long as the card is topped up sufficiently. Or is it still more complicated than that?
2: Are the reasons to prefer the UK SIM over the Dutch one still valid? If I buy the UK one, I have to pay an additional fee for the Dutch IMSI. Would you say that the advantages of the UK SIM outweigh this?
3: I've read about several cases of complications when people cross borders, but that seems to depend on the phone that is used. Am I right, that an iPhone 3G is likely to play well with the Toggle SIM, especially concerning automatical switching over at border crossings?

[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 ...

[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.)

[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

[inquisitor]

Originally Posted by ErWeeBee

1: As far as I've understood it should be possible then to use Data automatically in all three countries after having applied for that once and as long as the card is topped up sufficiently. Or is it still more complicated than that?

Yes, though the automatic IMSI switching may not work depending on your handset. Also you will probably need to manually configure an access point profile once for each country.

2: Are the reasons to prefer the UK SIM over the Dutch one still valid? If I buy the UK one, I have to pay an additional fee for the Dutch IMSI. Would you say that the advantages of the UK SIM outweigh this?

Yes, although voice rates of the British SIM are ~20% higher due to the same nominal rates being charged in Euro and Pound Sterling respectively, the Dutch connection fee of € 0.09 per call should quickly eat up the 20% difference as statistically mobile calls last less than 2 minutes.

Originally Posted by ronwi

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

Yes, there's a guy selling £5 top up codes through Facebook and email:
https://www.facebook.com/ToggleMobileUK
and his email is toggle@hp-vn.com

Although email as a sales channel isn't necessarily inspiring confidence, I have recently successfully tried to purchase two £5 vouchers which I received 15 minutes after my PayPal payment. Also I was able to redeem them by dialing *131*12-digit voucher code#.