Toggle Mobile

[bourbonkiller]

Austrian Numbers sound great! I am living in Austria and already have a swiss and german number on my toggle sim. Hope they become available very soon...

BK

[MBK]

Originally Posted by ChrisNeedsToKnow

I commute between Germany/Switzerland a lot.

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?

[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.

[tux]

Lycamobile is still working to become fully operational as Full MVNO in Italy... the only "positive sign" is that they've been assigned a MNC and a mobile phone prefix, but nobody knows what they're doing...

[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?

[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#.

[bourbonkiller]

I've sent an email to CS to ask for the availability of austrian numbers on Toggle, since they've recently launched lycamobile.at. Their answer is surprising, do they realy know about the other parts of their company?

BK


"Further to your email, we are sorry to inform you that currently we do not support Local number feature for Austria. We are always trying to add more countries to our local network hence we hope to be able to add Austria in the future.

We are sorry to say that at the moment we are unable to give you exact time frame for local network in Austria. However we have forwarded your comments to our respective department to explore the option with regards to your query and we will ensure that it will be done at the earliest.

If you would like to be informed about our latest news and offers please let us know and we will add you to our mailing list."