When reading a post like that, I am like "whaaat, people are locked in the 90s?" In France, it is almost unlimited for 20€/month, so very cheap, I do not care / try to optimize that. Happy for you you got unlimited :)
When reading a post like that, I am like "whaaat, people are locked in the 90s?" In France, it is almost unlimited for 20€/month, so very cheap, I do not care / try to optimize that. Happy for you you got unlimited :)
This is 100% a function of how well equipped a country's telco regulator is. Bad regulators will let companies have monopolies, good ones don't.
In Italy I pay 9.99 for 250GB, unlimited calls and SMS (never sent one in 10+ years but it's nice to have I guess), which for me is basically akin to infinite traffic given that unless I start downloading torrents from 5G I'll never ever run out of traffic ever
I assume it's a deliberate choice. Where I live these old prepaid contracts are still available next to the offerings you describe and are preferred by some older people and minimalists.
In Poland, I pay 25pln (~$7) per month for unlimited calling and texting + 24GB[1] per month I think.
The fun part is that the data rolls over, so I have something like 4TB of unused data right now, + whatever the special bonus pool I get with each top-up.
The gotcha of this promo is that it all resets back to 0 if you forget to top up even once. I put one over on them though, my bank has an "auto top-up" feature, which is completely free, and of which I'm a very happy customer.
[1] It's 15GB for the first month of the promotion and then it rises by 1GB each month until some cap. Not sure exactly what the cap is though, as the data rolls over and I'm using some each month, so it's very hard to keep track of.
Germany is more expensive (unless you go with a phone contract from the local grocery store - which I've heard mixed reviews about)
ALDI TALK offers EU-wide unlimited calls & SMS with 60 GB of data for 69.99 EUR per year. That is 5.80 EUR per month for unlimited calls/SMS and 5 GB of data [0]. I switched last year from O2 (they use the same network) after I realized that I only used more than 3 GB of data in two months during the last 3 years. I essentially cut my mobile phone costs by 70% for the same service. Compare to the O2 bloatware, the ALDI web interface is lightweight, fast and simple.
For 8.25 EUR/month, you get 250 GB of data per year, and for 12.40 EUR 450 GB/year.
[0] https://www.alditalk.de/jahres-paket
The grocery store plans are fine. There aren't any QoS tiers on mobile data networks in Germany to my knowledge, so the prioritization you get is just as good or bad as the 100€/month corporate plan sharing the same cell tower with you.