Tuenti SIM for Data

[Ashed]

I'll be in Spain for about four days in about two weeks and it seems like Tuenti offers the best value for my needs. I'll only be needing a micro-SIM for my Note 2.

I'll be arriving in San Sebastián first before heading towards Barcelona. Is the SIM really for free and I just need to add in €6 of credit to get the 1 GB data? Is activation instant?

[gaztelugatxe]

Originally Posted by Ashed

I'll be in Spain for about four days in about two weeks and it seems like Tuenti offers the best value for my needs. I'll only be needing a micro-SIM for my Note 2.

I'll be arriving in San Sebastián first before heading towards Barcelona. Is the SIM really for free and I just need to add in €6 of credit to get the 1 GB data? Is activation instant?

Hello

from what I've read Tuenti SIMs can only be bought in a very few places such as Telecor shops. Most people order them on the web site and you must pay 10 euros in order to activate the 1 Gb data pack (6euro + 21%Vat= 7,26 euro). The sim itself is free.

Regards

[NFH]

I see that Movistar is now advertising Tuenti tariffs on its web site with equal prominence to its own Movistar-branded tariffs.

I have a question though. The SIM card costs €10 which includes a 1GB 1-month bundle of €6 (€7.26 incl 21% VAT). When does this 1GB 1-month bundle start?

• When you order the SIM card?
• When you first use the SIM card?
• When you decide at a later date?

It's not clear from the web site.

[drama queen]

Originally Posted by NFH

I see that Movistar is now advertising Tuenti tariffs on its web site with equal prominence to its own Movistar-branded tariffs.

I have a question though. The SIM card costs €10 which includes a 1GB 1-month bundle of €6 (€7.26 incl 21% VAT). When does this 1GB 1-month bundle start?

• When you order the SIM card?
• When you first use the SIM card?
• When you decide at a later date?

It's not clear from the web site.

I visited Spain during July and found this thread extremely useful. The Tuenti card was excellent - better than previous options I have tried in Spain. I went to a Movistar shop in Santander, and they sold me the card for €12 with enough credit for 1GB for one month. I'm still not sure how exactly the cost breaks down - because the data tariff only appears to cost €6 for the month, and I assume that the minimum top-up is €10. However, I am happy to pay €12 for 1GB - and I used some of the spare credit for voice calls. If you were in Spain for more than 1 month, I suppose you could rollover the spare credit?

The coverage and speeds were generally excellent because the Movistar network is the best in Spain.

I was able to use Tethering, VOIP, Skype, Viber etc.

The purchase/activation procedure in the shop was pretty exhausting. The sales assistant was fairly competent and had just dealt with a tourist with exactly the same requirements in the queue in front of me. Nevertheless, the whole process still took about 20 minutes, and involved making copies of my passport and signing forms in duplicate! Not quite as bad as France, but still ridiculously complex. Also, I was not given the APN, although I had made a note of it before going to Spain, so I was able to set this up manually.

[1040Berlin]

1.) Find a Movistar store (One of the Spanish networks). The Store locator is not too helpful but gives a rough orientation. All or most Carrefour stores seem to have a Movistar store. But in all their three lacations of Palma de Mallorca the Tuenti SIMs were sold out when I tried.

2.) You need your ID and EUR 12 and an E-mail address. The shop assistant will ask for your Spanish permanent or semipermanent address but you do not need one to buy a Spanish SIM.

3.) Note: Tuenti has three different sizes of SIM cards missing the the new one with the micro SIM to break out from the standard SIM. So be sure to get the size your phone uses. In the Movistar where I bought my SIM the two smaller sizes were sold out.

4.) After the registration process (in the shop) the connection is active immediately. You get confirmation text messages with your phone number, the chosen tariff and a link to register in tuenti.com.

5.) When you chose the 6 Euro (+ VAT) package (1 GByte, voice calls: 3 cent per minute) the remaining credit is 4.74 Euro.

6.) All managing is done by web access except the usual GSM codes to activate and deactivate voicemail inbox. If you use the card for short term holidays do not forget to deactivate "auto renewal". To keep the connection in function you need to load EUR 5 every 6 months. International roaming is activated by default.

7.) Callback calls work.

[NFH]

On their web site, I see that it costs €10 including VAT. It sounds as if it's 20% more in a shop.

I see on the tariffs page that out-of-bundle usage is charged at €0.0363/MB including VAT. For a short stay, I might not want to buy a whole gigabyte as it could be cheaper to pay this higher out-of-bundle rate. When buying on the web site, it forces you to buy the gigabyte bundle. Do I have to buy a whole gigabyte if I buy it in a shop?

Can I order it on the web site for delivery to my hotel? Or would this cause complications with having to produce ID in person at some stage?

[NFH]

I went to Barcelona for two nights this week, so I went to Movistar's largest shop in Barcelona at Plaça de Catalunya to buy a SIM card. Before travelling, I had tried to phone the shop at least thirty times but they never answered the phone; I expected a telephone company to be better at using telephones. When I got there, they sent me to the local tourism office, which was oddly located upstairs on the first floor of the Movistar shop. They had sold out of SIM cards and sent me back downstairs. I was then told that the entire shop (despite being the largest in Barcelona) was out of stock of Movistar nano-SIMs and that in any case they refuse to supply nano-SIMs to prepaid customers. The guy suggested Tuenti but they were out of stock of Tuenti SIM cards too. I had been considering Movistar rather than Tuenti (also owned by Telefonica) because of the short duration of my stay and I didn't want to buy a whole gigabyte. Anyway, the guy then sent me across Plaça de Catalunya to Fnac, where there is another Movistar shop upstairs, but there was luckily a girl on the ground floor selling Tuenti SIM cards at a temporary stall. I therefore bought a SIM card for €12. She was extremely helpful and gave me detailed instructions on how to set up my online login to specifically the mobile section of Tuenti's web site. Without these instructions, I would have struggled as it was far from obvious how to do this, and I would have probably only set up a profile on Tuenti's social network. It was not possible to opt out of the 1GB initial bundle and pay €0.0363/MB from the outset and I eventually used 200MB during my entire stay, which would have cost the same at the pay-as-you-go rate. SIP services seemed to be blocked. The balance, after buying the 1GB bundle for €7.26, was €4.74. This means that the €2 higher cost of buying the SIM card in a shop (€12) compared to online (€10) is reflected directly in €2 more additional credit.

As many iPhone users know, when you put a SIM card into an iPhone anywhere in the world, it sends an SMS to Apple's iMessage and FaceTime activation servers which are hosted by Vodafone UK on eleven possible numbers, +44 7786 205094 and +44 7537 4102*1 (where * can be any digit). Although many networks suppress charges for these activation SMS in their SMSCs, Tuenti charges a whopping €0.73 for each message. If iMessage and FaceTime activation doesn't work the first time (which is often the case), your iPhone will send multiple SMS to these numbers, causing a significant balance deduction, which in my case halved my residual balance. When I queried the charges with Tuenti's e-mail support, they told me that they would refund them as a one-off but would not do so again. They even suggested to me that I should not activate iMessage and FaceTime in future - not a very helpful suggestion.

[UKSTEVE]

Thanks for the report on Barca/Spain NFH.

This is one of the reasons why I switched to using a EuropaSIM about 18 months ago for my European travels.

The new offer of 500MB + 25m incoming/outgoing calls per day for 3 euros is pretty unbeatable, and the data speed drops to 32Kbps when you go over.

Obviously if you plan to stream video etc., whilst in your hotel room, then it pays to consider using WiFi, but 500MB will give you a few hours of standard YouTube definition video easily.

I used to buy specific country SIMs on eBay/Amazon, but the networks tightened up on the ID requirements for this, so the deals available have decreased a lot, whilst prices have gone up

Single country SIMs are useful, though, if you travel infrequently.

Good report / thanks / Steve

[NFH]

I have just spent two weeks working in Spain, in Barcelona and Madrid. My two Spanish colleagues are on Vodafone and Orange, and there were many places, both at work and elsewhere, where I had a signal and they did not. In fact, with Tuenti (running on Movistar), there was not one place where I experienced no coverage. Even on the 300km/h AVE train from Barcelona to Madrid, I had my laptop tethered to my iPhone and the connection didn't drop out once during the whole journey, even in tunnels.

I was told by Spanish colleagues that Movistar is well known to have the best coverage and Orange the worst, and that this is reflected in each network's prices. However, in the case of Tuenti, you get the cheapest price and the best coverage.

One downside of Tuenti is its charges for inserting its SIM cards into iPhones. Whenever a SIM card is inserted into an iPhone, it sends one or more hidden SMS messages to +44 7786 205094 or +44 7537 4102X1, even if FaceTime and iMessage and turned off. Tuenti charges for these messages at €0.73 each. Other networks zero-rate SMS sent to these numbers because the customer did not choose to send them, including other Telefonica networks and MVNOs (for example Movistar Spain, O2 Ireland, O2 UK, O2 Czech Republic and MVNO Giffgaff UK). After getting irrelevant responses from Tuenti such as "we don't support FaceTime", I have complained to Tuenti but I am still waiting for a response after two weeks, despite them logging it as a formal complaint.

[tux]

What speeds did you get with Tuenti?