Lycamobile US
 

Lycamobile have launched their US service... Lycamobile | Low Cost international calls | Best international SIM card | Free SIMs

Preliminary data point to Lyca being a T-Mobile MVNO.

Pay per minute @ $0.04/minute for domestic calls.
$39/month for unlimited domestic calls, 100MB data and $10 international calling credit.
$49/month for unlimited domestic calls, 250MB data and $20 international calling credit.

Note the 'magic words' "Free SIMs".
On PAYGO:::: $0.04 for SMS to USA. $0.06/MB internet.
120 day no activity expiration. No clear info [=easily found] info on how long a top-up lasts. $5 minimum payment option is visible. Most international rates seem pretty good. And it also roams internationally. This looks very interesting. You might have to fight the web form a little to get your address in but it will work eventually.

Not a bad deal on the data front. Lyca's Toggle Mobile deal may be better for EU visitors... For voice at least :)

+Steve :)

I'm sorry but that Free Incoming Calls while roaming is too good to be true or to last. This will break down as soon as people (like me) who know how to turn free incoming into free outgoing get their hands on the SIM. Remember that for calling US mobile numbers, there's no cellular surcharge. No way this is going to work. They'll be broke in 3 months.

Yes, I was wondering about that - free incoming to a US number in Europe would be fantastic - although we do have a form of this at present with T-Mobile using UMA over Wi-Fi.

Lycamobile US looks like a great deal, and I'll certainly be trying it, but as in Lycamobile's other countries, its website does not inspire confidence (missing obvious information, bad links, atrocious grammar), and it has Lyca's annoying rapid expiration policy (which I have to admit isn't that bad compared to other US providers - but I suspect they could have made it 365 days if they'd felt like it).

Now if only they could do Canada.

yeah, the lyca websites are all looking like these etho-calling-card websites... their customer support is very good though (very indian accent speaking guys in the UK but very responsive and with good knowledge)

What's not clear is whether the quoted "4c/minute, 4c/text" price also applies to incoming communications. I know that it is the norm for North American networks to quote a single price which is understood by consumers to apply to both incoming and outgoing communications. However, this might not be the case here, given that incoming calls and texts are free when roaming and because Lycamobile is a British company which applies British conventions to foreign markets, e.g. no top-up requirement to maintain validity of credit.

In any case, I've never understood the North American convention of charging for incoming texts. Whilst I understand the economics of charging for incoming calls, the same rationale can't be applied to incoming texts. It's also not fair to charge for receiving a communication when the user has no option to reject it.

I signed up for one of their Free SIMs and a short time later received repeated calls from "1.123.456.7890", which I did not answer because of the bogus caller ID. I'm curious if anyone else got similar calls?

I don't understand or agree with this practice either but in the defense of the carriers I'll just say that most American customers have either unlimited domestic texting or a huge text bucket.

Nope.
 

Nope. Nada. Zilch. [to fulfill 10 character requirement.]

True, but this doesn't help prepaid customers who comprise the members of this forum. I'm sure nearly all of us here have monthly contracts in our home countries with similarly generous allowances.

I gave up trying to get relatives and friends to move to top level services like Whatsapp, Viber, etc. and purchased a subscription to Line2 because I didn't want to pay ATT $30 a month. Line2 gives me a virtual cell number which receives SMS and forwards wherever I wanted it to. When I first started, it had a callback service. Unfortunately they pulled that. It costs me $8 a month (buying several months at a time), works VOIP Over 3g, allows me to forward calls on the fly, and gives me unlimited SMSes which I can receive on whatever SIM card I might have in my phone.

If I had it do over, I might look at VoxOx which offers something similar but includes a callbackservice.

OK. Just a random telemarketer then.

PAYGO working and new plan. Lower PAYGO talk charge
 

I received my SIM today via UPS 2nd day air.

PAYGO is now working according to CS.

Went to the web site and they have lowered the talk rate for PAYGO:

And added another 'plan':

I am going to wait until April to activate, so I have to trust them that PAYGO is now working.
[Sorry for double post but both threads seem worthy. ]

I wouldn't count on it lasting anyway.

This may just be a promotional offer for a certain time (although I expect the brand's main focus is on calls made within USA, not roaming).

For a while after Lyca launched Toggle, it had free incoming calls in over 140 countries; slightly less than half of that now.

I just ordered a free SIM, and looking at the order code, I suspect the last five digits indicate the number of orders so far - in which case there have been about 15,000.

I certainly hope Lycamobile can make money at 2c/min.

I've finally registered my Lycamobile US SIM (in Germany) and my wife will be giving it a try in Miami in two weeks. There were lots of bugs in the website programming (spaces were not ignored, the mandatory login with the phone number had an incorrect 0 on the beginning, some things not translated, etc.).

I notice that the "free SIM" now costs $7. I wonder what that could tell us.

Anyway, I can now confirm that it really does cost only 30 cents to receive a call in Germany. Hope they can stay in business.

They don't understand the USA. [leading zero in account number also]

It is said on Howard Forums that if you order a SIM and put a $5 topup on it, the SIM will ship free.
I have no need to test, but the ones saying this are reliable forum members.

The 2 cent per minute rate for US to US calls is incredibly inexpensive. Lyca uses T-Mobile towers so people considering it should compare coverage as well as cost with AT&T MVNO's. One website also reports that you need at least one billable event every 90 days to maintain service (cellguru.net).

I use H2O (an AT&T MVNO) for the primary sim in my dual sim phone and Telna Mobile (using mostly T-Mobile in the USA) for the secondary sim card. Both sim chips have inexpensive USA rates, but not as cheap as Lyca Mobile. Lyca won't work for me though because I need the AT&T coverage footprint more in the US. T-Mo is more of a backup for me. Plus Telna has better international roaming rates than Lyca does (at least for Canada, Mexico, non-US Caribbean; European roaming rates are more competitive).

Doesn't Lyca roam on AT&T like TMO prepaid does?

No roaming on AT&T
 

As far as is known: NO. No one on Howard Forums has claimed this to be true.
On Howard Forums, Lycamobile in the USA is very popular.
I am not in an area to test it. I am in southern California
and AT&T 2G & 3G say 'Network Unavailable' when I try to connect to their network.

They had said they would launch in Kanada last year but did not. No explanation at all. fingers crossed as the new entrants are going bust..

Lycamobile US has recently become useless, particularly for those who need data. Following is a summary of recent changes, which they've kept very quiet:

1. According to http://www.lycamobile.us/en/termsandconditions "From 5 August 2014 any new top up credit shall expire ninety [90] days from the date of top-up or recharge. For the avoidance of doubt, this does not apply to the existing credit balance in your Account before 5 August 2014."
2. Data is no longer available on pay-as-you-go since 16th September 2014; to get data, you now have to pay for an expensive monthly plan including minutes and texts that you probably don't need or want.
3. Charges for calls (outgoing and incoming) on pay-as-you-go have risen from $0.02 to $0.05 per minute.

Lycamobile is now a worse deal than T-Mobile US, which offers plenty of data bundles, e.g. $10 for 1GB for 30 days.

Lycamobile is a British company and had exported the British fair play approach on SIM expiry policy to all the countries in which it operates. It is a shame that Lycamobile has made an exception to this fair play approach and is now depriving its US customers of their credit after 90 days. Coupled with no data on pay-as-you-go, this is now a SIM card to avoid. What a shame that they have destroyed a potentially useful product.

All of the above is true to the extent that it is what Lycamobile says on its website.

However, in actual practice, much has not actually happened yet.
With regard to the list of the three items:
1. It is still too soon to see if this is going to work as described. There are many on Howard Forums waiting for the 90 days to come to pass.
2. This seems to be true with the new 'Plus' SIMs. Old SIMs data seems to still work on PAYGO.
3. To the best of my knowledge and those on Howard Forums' threads this has not 'actually, really' happened to anyone yet.
There have been false alarms--mostly people who were careless in their checking of balances.

Perhaps, someday, all this will come to pass. Other than loss of data, that day has not arrived.

Where is PAYGO? PAYGO is difficult to find on the website because it is very well hidden and not called PAYGO.
If you activate a SIM and do not choose a plan you will be on PAYGO.

For further current info I would suggest searching the General Prepaid Forum on Howard Forums for Lycamobile.
On the 'monster' thread, [about Lycamobile coming to the US and Canada] only read the last twenty pages or so.

That was previously my understanding too. However, my mother has borrowed my old Lycamobile US SIM card this week, and cannot use data. She's tried both APNs - data.lycamobile.us/lmus/plus and data.lycamobile.com. When I phoned Lycamobile for advice, they told me that data is no longer available go any pay-as-you-go customers, even those with old SIM cards.

I am going to ask this on HoFo. I will update later today.

http://www.howardforums.com/showthre...4#post15604274

Messages #3 and #4 in this thread indicate data is still working on PAYGO.

But message 5 indicates that it is intermittently unreliable, even on a monthly plan. This concurs with my mother's experience on PAYG; she encountered <5% reliability.