UK phone carrier O2 pay as you go versus contract cellphone line-A service review
O2 is a UK based mobile phone company
A £15 per month contract adds up to £25 per month
On coming to the United Kingdom,my wife and I signed up to the sim only contract for a £15 per month deal. This would mean £30 in total per month for the two sim cards for the allotted 200 minutes and 200 text messages. However our bill always came to about £52 combined per month even though neither of us use the cellphone that much. Lacking knowledge on other deals,we stuck with the contract for three years. The comparison only came to light when we switched to Pay as you go.The difference between the Monthly contract and the Pay as you go deal is astounding to say the least.
Pay as you go on O2
On using the Pay as you go sim-cards, we discovered that if you talk for more than 3 minutes on one call, the rate is reduced. This is something we were not aware of and surely came in as a nice bonus to using O2’s Pay as you go sim-cards. Needless to say, our top ups have lasted longer than the contract we were on and have proven to be much more cost effective. Another benefit is that we are able to control our spending on the cell phone bill by deciding how much to use and top up.
3G-On the Internet with the Pay as you go sim-card
Using 3G to connect to the Internet was seamless for us. We use phones and with the contract we had before, we had to subscribe to the service from O2 in order to get online. This would have incurred further charges so we did not bother with this. Upon switching to Pay as you go sim cards, I tried out using 3G to connect to the Internet via my phone and the cost was £1 per day!
Conclusion
I would recommend the Pay as you go sim card deal from O2 as it seemed to work better financially for us. However a better solution would be to spend sometime investigating how other deals work on other networks, as this will prove to be beneficial in the long run.
From my experience, being on contract proved a very murky business, as we could never understand our bills at the end of the month.
Unless you are absolutely clear and sure about what the contract with a cell phone carrier entails, I would advise going with a service you would have more control over-Pay as you go is the way to go for me
