Last week I stayed in London for two days. Subscribing to the 2GB data pack (£10) for exclusive use in the UK by dialing *141*1000# (a so-called USSD command) worked flawlessly even though I activated it already from Germany while using the German IMSI. During the USSD operation I was also informed that the data pack is subject to auto-renewal unless cancelled by dialing *190# (if I remember properly). Cancellation went smoothly as well. However there was no text message that would explicitly inform me of the data pack being active, which left me in doubt in that regard.
After arriving at Heathrow on Wednesday my Zopo ZP980 didn't register on the network for ages so I finally switched IMSIs manually after which I immediately had a signal. The same happened, by the way, when I arrived in Frankfurt coming from a non-toggle EU country earlier that day, where the Dutch Vodafone IMSI was used last. Unfortunately I couldn't check which IMSI was in use and whether IMSIs were automatically switched at all because none of the Android apps that reveal your IMSI supports dual SIM phones yet and instead only show the IMSI of your primary SIM while the toggle SIM was residing on the second SIM slot and I had no time to swap them. However I would rather blame my exotic phone's possibly buggy STK implementation for the failure to register than toggle.
Data rates in the UK, where toggle uses the O2 network, were quite disappointing as I rarely saw bandwidth surpassing 1 MBit/s. At Liverpool Station the network was totally congested causing a packet loss of >90% so Internet access was simply impossible. However my observations are not representative as my phone does not support UMTS900, of which O2 makes extensive use in London, so it was sticked to potentially overloaded UMTS2100 cells.
To my disappointment I experienced a total data outage on Thursday morning for some 4h when I actually needed Internet access most. After informing customer care at 8:46h data was available again at about 11:15h and at 12:10h I was called back by a support agent who made sure the issue was resolved. From what I can say customer support quality is pretty well.
Further shortcomings of toggle's British data packs are:
- no possibility to check data consumption or validiy of data pack
- data pack purchases are not listed in the call records (you virtually cannot comprehend billing)
- you cannot see data pack susbcription on the online customer portal
- data packs cannot be activated or cancelled from the online customer portal