german ortel SIM with Europe voice&data package

[dg7feq]

the german prepaid SIM provider ORTEL now provides a new EU package called "cross"
it cost 20 Euro / 30 days and offeres
300 minutes to/from all EU countries + switzerland and 750 MB of data @ 7.2 Mbit in all EU countries + switzerland.
additional 500 MB can be added for 9€

(list of all countries covered: Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark, Germany, Estonia, Finland, France, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Austria, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Sweden, Switzerland, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, Czech Republic, Hungary, Cyprus)

details: http://www.ortelmobile.de/crosseurope.html

[peterdoo]

A great offer! I wonder why there is not more feedback here on this subject.

The great advantage is that Germany is not excluded like on most other roaming offers where for the home country one has to book another package. So it does not matter, how many roaming days during a month.

For a few week multi country trip with similar allowance (300 min / 750 MB) most other roaming packages are more expensive.

Few open questions remain for which I could not find an explication on their web page:
- Is there a connection fee like in other Ortel tariffs?
- What happens when there is not enough credit to book another 20 euro package?

[dg7feq]

on all ortel tariffs this is the same:

- As long as you are inside your included minutes there is no connection fee
- if you dont have enough money on the card the tariff is not booked and you are charged standard fee. After recharging you might need to manually activate the tariff again

[wolfbln]

I think the best feature of this EU roaming pack has not even been fully understood yet.

For voice, it does not only include all incoming calls unlimited without a fee (which other providers do too).
For outgoing calls most "roaming packs" only include connections from the roaming country to the home country (like most roaming packs of Three, Vodafone and many more). But this pack includes all outgoing calls within the EU/EEA (incl. Switzerland) to landlines and mobile lines (except may be premium numbers). This applies to data and calls within or from Germany too, where you don't need to buy another pack, but of course are offered to do.
-> So a call from Athens to Dublin or from Lisbon to Warsaw is included in the package allowance too.
Liechtenstein is included too, even if not mentioned on their website - as confirmed to teltarif.de.

I think this is the first real pan-European roaming solution. I'm just checking this SIM to include it in my "European Union" section on the prepaid-data-sim-card WIKI. We focus on data there, but if you want voice too, it's even below the rates of Skype and the best monthly deal I know so far on prepaid.

There are some merchants on Ebay.de and Amazon.de selling the starter kit and sending it abroad. In Germany it's sold almost for free. Topping up is not a problem as Ortel accepts credit cards and PayPal which is not geo-restricted. Registration in Germany is made online ... and you know ... somewhat lax Validity is a bit tricky: Some activity every 3 months and a top-up every 6 months plus 2 months of grace period. E-plus has a generally good choice of roaming partners within Europe, but no 4G/LTE abroad yet.

I only hope that Ortel mobile Germany which is attached to the E-plus Group will survive the restructuring process of Telefónica and we see more tariffs like this.