I mentioned a couple of days ago that Tesco Mobile appears to round up very small amounts of data and effectively charge more than their advertised rate. That conclusion may be flawed as it assumed that the PAYG credit balance displayed in their app was correct. It isn't!

After an initial top-up two days ago of £5, last night the app showed my credit balance as £3.97. This morning, with no usage and no top-ups, it shows my balance as £4.96. This also happened two days ago but I thought I must have mis-read what it was telling me. This time I have screenshots one and two to prove it. This is weird behaviour and I've no idea what Tesco is actually charging for data.

In reply to a post by ashdown:

Thanks. I wasn't aware of 1p Mobile's IOT offer and ther itemised data use is particularly attractive.

£4 per month isn't too bad but I'm still hoping for a service around £2/month. I know that £4/month is a fairly trivial cost in the grand scheme of things but it just seems a waste to pay for umpteen minutes and texts when I need none of them and for a substantial amount of data when I just need less than 10 MB/month. It does show, though, how cheap mobile connectivity has become.

I do appreciate all the suggestions made in this thread. It should give plenty of ideas to anyone else looking for something similar.

The thing is the free stuff to include isn't because they expect everyone to use it. Just like at work I sell servers with unmetered bandwidth - not because I hope everyone used 1Gbps solid (it would cost more than server usually if so) but because I don't want the hassle of metering it.. and some people want one thing some another so a bundle means they can justify the package overall

For the mobile data you could use AAISP (£2/month+VAT) but data on top.. but it's data.. you can terminate it on L2TP so you could do MiTM on your side too.. and they are the sort of people who I would expect to handle billing ok.. but no SMS I believe - data only usually means that for IoT.. not SMS too
https://www.aa.net.uk/voice-and-mobile/data-sims/

seb

Edited by seb (Wed 19-Mar-25 22:33:22)