Toggle Mobile

[peterdoo]

Originally Posted by ChrisNeedsToKnow

Same with UK-Toggle cards: The menu for local numbers now lists Austria, Belgium and Romania.

But unfortunatelly Italy and Portugal are not listed although the normal Lycamobile customers seem to get these identities automatically (without a local number) while roaming in these countries.

I visit at least 8 Toggle countries each year, so 9 identities is quite a limitation.

Originally Posted by inquisitor

With all the expertise in SIM card engineering Lycamobile has demonstrated with toggle I cannot understand why they don't use this simple and convenient feature. Please guys, implement a EHPLMN list for all our IMSIs!

Not all, but most of today's phones allow data roaming on networks of the same country without indicating roaming and without respecting the setting for data roaming. There is normally no need for EHPLMN. On my Alditalk SIM EHPLMN is empty. There is no mention of 262 07 anywhere on the SIM. It happily roams on O2 including data without indicating roaming and without the need to enable data roaming (S4 mini phone).

[inquisitor]

Originally Posted by peterdoo

Not all, but most of today's phones allow data roaming on networks of the same country without indicating roaming and without respecting the setting for data roaming. There is normally no need for EHPLMN.

You are wrong. The suppression of the roaming indication can only be achieved by the EHPLMN list (let's ignore the infeasible way of modifying handset operating systems as that usually is beyond the power of network operators).
Since I see your contributions in the relevant threads of the German telefon-treff.de board dealing with the eplus/o2 merger in Germany where a EHPLMN list has recently been implemented by OTA updates, I wonder how you come to such claims.
As you probably also know there is a thread listing phones that don't have EHPLMN support implemented correctly and hence still indicate the other network as a "roaming" network: http://www.telefon-treff.de/showthre...hreadid=571120

On my Alditalk SIM EHPLMN is empty. There is no mention of 262 07 anywhere on the SIM. It happily roams on O2 including data without indicating roaming and without the need to enable data roaming (S4 mini phone).

How do you read the EHPLMN field? Have you made sure that your method is actually working correctly?
My German O2 and Aldi SIM cards both received a EHPLMN list in the course of the merger of O2 and eplus and the associated national roaming. Both now carry 26203 (formerly eplus) or 26207 (O2) in the EHPLMN field as the following example of an O2 SIM proves:

[ChrisNeedsToKnow]

Originally Posted by peterdoo

...I visit at least 8 Toggle countries each year, so 9 identities is quite a limitation...

I will try to get a replacement of my "main" SIM now. From then on I´ll only get IMSIs for my "core" countries. Furthermore I´l get a second SIM to use in remote countries that I rarely go to.

I hope the SIM-replacement will work out

PS - anyone managed to get a Belgian number/IMSI working?

[inquisitor]

During the last 7 days I used my toggle SIM in Chicago in my Samsung Galaxy S5 DuoS. As my German postpaid SIM includes 500MB of data for roaming including for the US, I used toggle for voice only which why I used it on GSM only.
Interestingly my phone sometimes indicated the T-Mobile network my toggle SIM was registered on as "roaming" network and sometimes not. Initially I though that might be owed to the fact that T-Mobile (like all the US networks) use multiple MCC/MNC tuples of which some correspond to the prefix of my toggle SIM's US IMSI and some not. However I realized that the US IMSI of my toggle SIM start with 311-960 which is Lycamobile's MCC/MNC tuple while T-Mobile uses only 310 as MCC and the last network my SIM was registered on was 310-260, so the IMSI prefix and the MCC/MNC tuple of the used radio access network always differed.
Now that I'm back in Germany I was able to read my toggle SIM's EHPLMN list. The "Equivalent Home Public Land Mobile Network" list allows to assign one or more MCC/MNC tuples to a SIM card which are then treated as home network which - if correctly implemented on your phone - are not considered roaming networks any longer. However the EHPLMN list of my toggle's US identity is empty, so basicly every single network should be considered a roaming network since 311-960 (Lycamobile's tuple) does not exist as physical radio access network - instead it will always use T-Mobile's network with some 310-x tuple.
Now I really wonder why my phone sometimes has not indicated roaming for my toggle SIM. Was that a bug of my phone or do Lycamobile or T-Mobile some magic here? E.g. broadcasting 311-960 as a virtual network from T-Mobile's towers? Afaik it is possible to broadcast multiple MNCs from the same physical RAN however not for GSM but only in UMTS.
Service in Chicago was not very reliable - I could not send SMS to a couple of countries (e.g. to Telekom Slovenia subscribers) and some calls were not connected - instead there was an announcement in American English saying that the call could not be completed and that I should contact customer care if I believe this was a mistake. However my tight schedule did not allow to further investigate this or contact toggle. Also I noticed that for outgoing calls there was a strange sequence of distorted dial tones in the first seconds which sounded like the call is transferred through a couple of systems. That's no serious issue but let me wonder what route my calls went through.

Unrelated to above observation of roaming indication I wonder why toggle don't make use of the EHPLMN feature. Today we have to enable data roaming to use toggle for data service within toggle countries since the toggle SIM IMSIs always differ from the underlying local partner MNO's MCC/MNC tuple. However enabling data roaming for our toggle SIMs involves the danger of forgetting to switch off data roaming once we leave toggle countries which can quickly vaporize our balance if our phones start transferring data in a non-toggle country. Even within Europe there are countries where toggle bills data at horrific rates of more than 10 £/MB.
With all the expertise in SIM card engineering Lycamobile has demonstrated with toggle I cannot understand why they don't use this simple and convenient feature.
Please guys, implement a EHPLMN list for all our IMSIs!

[ChrisNeedsToKnow]

Trying to register a Belgian number now gives a new error:

"local imsi is not greater than max imsi index"

Does that mean it would work, had I not registered too many numbers before?

I have the UK-number and 8 others, of which only 2 others are currently active (UK, German and Swiss active + 6 inactive numbers).

I seem to remember reading here that it's only possible to reset the IMSIS by getting a new SIM? Did anyone suceed in doing this?

And biggest question: Did anyone successfully register a Belgian, Austrian or Romanian number?

Rgds, Christian

[inquisitor]

That error message, as many messages from toggle's system, obviously is linguistically flawed. But it obviously tries to say what has been stated here before - toggle SIMs support a maximum of 9 IMSIs including the original British or Dutch one. I hope toggle will soon come up with a more convenient solution than swapping SIM cards which will probably lead to the loss of all existing IMSIs and - what would hurt me most - the assigned local numbers.
As my IMSI count is at 7 right now, I refrain from testing whether one of these new countries are actually implemented already.

[inquisitor]

Thanks. What kind of software do you use to read your SIM? I would like to cross check what that tool says for my SIM cards that according to my good old Nokia N95 have a EHPLMN list.

[peterdoo]

Originally Posted by inquisitor

Thanks. What kind of software do you use to read your SIM? I would like to cross check what that tool says for my SIM cards that according to my good old Nokia N95 have a EHPLMN list.

I use one of the cyan 5€ USB SIM readers from Amazon and a home made Windows software. If you want to give it a try, you can get it here.

It only works with low cost Phoenix style readers. Not with more expensive PC/SC readers.

Open a CMD window and specify the COM port number of the reader (you can find it in the device manager) and the PIN, for example (COM10 and PIN 1234):
cardread -port=10 -PIN=1234

[PhotoJim]

We're just back from Europe. I used Toggle for the first time there, initially in the UK and then in France.

There are tons of options in the UK but Toggle works well, calls home to Canada inexpensively, and has inexpensive local data add-ons. I was very pleased with it there.

In France, the situation is more complicated. Prepaid SIMs are a bit trickier to get. Lyca and lebara goth have good options. But you know what? I found Toggle to be perfectly satisfactory. I wish you could buy a smaller block of data than a gigabyte (a half gig would have done me fine) but the rates were reasonable enough for data, and the voice rates were great. The local French number came in quite handy when we had an issue with our rented flat and our property manager wanted a way to reach us.

I'll definitely be keeping my Toggle SIMs alive to use again, even though we don't travel abroad that often. And hopefully Canada is added to the list of countries with good rates - it would be great to give travelers here a better option than is available now.

[gaztelugatxe]

Hello

I came from Portugal and receiving calls to the Spanish toggle number were free of charge (as you already confirmed me )

On the other hand, I had a problem that also happened to me while in France last year: some calls (just few of them) are finished without a reason.

I´ve been using an old Nokia now and also a another similar handset in France.

Calling parties had differents handsets this time and were using even different networks in Spain (Vodafone ES to call to France and Yoigo ES to call to Portugal)

Did anyone have such issues?

Regards