Simyo Spain €5/month data (upto 500MB)

[pete_l]

Although it might be a bit late to add to this topic, here goes anyway (I only found this forum the other day - after I had "discovered" simyo and their €5 offer).
On the basis of their website ad. and a small amount of unqualified chatter on some ex-pat forums about Simyo, I decided to try it out. So far I've been using a Vodafone PAYG 3G connection, which costs €60 and gives 1GB of transfer.
I opted for the Tarifa Movil Diaria (solo Tarifa diaria). I.e. I didn't buy the modem

• First of all, you can only order this on the internet. You create an account at www.simyo.esTelefonía móvil sin ataduras, tarifas bajas, móviles libres e internet móvil and add your details. it will ask you for a passport number or NIE number (if you don't know what an NIE is - you haven't got one )
• Once you have an account you can buy the SIM. There are two options "prepago" (prepay) or contract. At first I tried to apply for a contract SIM. However for this you need a spanish bank account number and a credit card number. For some reason I could not get it to accept an english CC number with a spanish bank account, nor with my english bank account.
  Because of that, I ended up getting a prepay account. This only needs a credit card and my english one was good enough.
• Also you need a spanish address for this to be delivered to.
• Second, you need to be there to sign for the package when it arrives. I ordered mine on thursday and the postman drove over to my house on saturday morning to deliver it, get a signature and to write down my passport number
• The cost was €4.95 which was the delivery cost and I got €5 free credit to the account
• You need an unlocked phone to put the SIm in - even if you're only planning to use data (see later). The reason is that to register the SIM you have to make an initial call, or send a SMS from a phone using the SIM. Once that's done you ca use the data option.
• Here's the killer. The data link is GPRS only. Not 3G: just modem speeds of 3 or 4 kByte/second. Simyo never tell you this and it's not at all obvious from the stuff they send you. One small giveaway is that you have to set the APN to gprs-service.com
• I have had no luck whatsoever in using this SIM in either an unlocked ZTE-MF627 USB dongle (that I got for "3" data services in the UK), nor with my Vodafone dongle - either as it stood, or after I had upgraded / unocked it.
  The ZTE just plain croaks and the E220 spits the message:
  USIM/SIM card does not exist or is unavailable
  On closer inspection, it turns out that the Simyo SIM only has 6 "pads" on it, compared to the 8 on my 3G data and voice-phone SIMs
• Right now and for the foreseeable future the SIM is in my old Motorola V220 GPRS phone, tethered to my PC via USB and using Motorola's phone tools to manage the connection. My assumption is that if yo buy the Simyo modem (for €69 ) you get precisely that: a modem that connects to your computer, not a 3G dongle.

So, is it worth it? Well, for €5 a month I get 500MB of transfer (uploads + downloads totalled together) at low speed. The documentation, in spanish, seems to imply that a prepay lasts for 6 months, though I'll tell you more in 6 months time . Compare this with Vodafone.es's €60 for 1GB which only lasts for 3 months - but can be many, many times faster. Provided the link doesn't drop to 2G - which happens frequently out here in the boonies. I can also pull the phone off my PC and use it to make voice calls and SMS's, so it's bit more versatile than just a 3G dongle and means you don't need another SIM for making calls.
My one concern is over this €0.99 per day maximum / €5 per month thing. Looking at my online account for yesterday it shows

Fecha Hora Duración kB Bloques Coste
05-Dec-2009 23:59:29 864 seg 4269 kB 18 0.44€
05-Dec-2009 22:51:30 4,080 seg 11488 kB 46 0€
05-Dec-2009 16:58:25 12,535 seg 49956 kB 196 1.15€

which is obviously more than €0.99

[gaidal]

I'd like to warn everyone against this one.

Firstly, as the previous poster said it seems to be gprs only and is pretty slow, although I do get a 3G symbol outdoors. But that's not what makes me disappointed because if you look closely it doesn't say anything about speed for the €5 plan, only the €24.99 one.

I've had it for 5 days on my iPhone and used 20 + 4 mb (down + up), and for this they've charged me €6.11! The tariff on the website that sounds so good isn't what they're actually using, they charge for every connection up to at least €0.99 + tax or more per day, even if I'm only using 1 mb in total. This wouldn't have mattered if it actually stopped at €5 but it doesn't.

I had a Spanish speaking friend call the customer service, the first two times to find out if they meant €5 maximum per day or per month, and the first and second person told her different things. The third time was a few days later, to find out why they charge me so much: They clearly tried to talk themselves out of it, letting her talk to different people, having her wait, and in between giving random explanations that were a joke, such as "look at this session at this date and time, you got it for free because you had reached the limit right?" or "well this plan is not meant for downloading, only for simple stuff like checking your e-mail, it might be better if you don't use it a lot...". As I said I had only used 20 mb down in 5 days. Do they think it's still 1999 or what?
When we threatened to report them to a consumer rights organization they finally said that they would look into it (after 30 min) but didn't offer anything immediately, not even a reference number until my friend demanded it.
What a customer service, it's like the wild west. :P

It's kind of sad isn't it, because simyo's 500 mb for €5 would have been the cheapest Spanish data plan by far, had it been true!

Or has anyone had it work for them?

[laptopnomad]

Thanks so much for sharing!

I can relate to the experience - not getting to what's being promised and then trying to work a local helpdesk to get the truth out. As i experienced so many times, DATA plans are not understood well enough by local helpdesks.

As it seems to me Simyo has several problems to solve here. Foremost education & training of the helpdesk.

Because the 500Mb was way to small for me, I choose Yoigo - so far so good - knock on wood.

It gives me 3.1Gb of 3G for € 93,- (ex tax) a month with a daily limit of 100 Mb - after which speeds drops to GPRS alike. It's not the cheapest I know.

So a bit of my helpdesk experience:
Yoigo has AFAIK three English speaking operators - all 3 know the DATA plan well enough to help Internet savvy heavy users. Their e-mail response in English is within 36 hours.

And yes, there are (rural) parts of Spain that are still GPRS only, of course depending on the cellphone network. I got a few as well.

So this place PrePaidGSM is the only place I know where to get a bit of feedback on the actual quality of 3G operators.
It's not all about the price IMHO, also the (underlying) network and the people who run the helpdesk.

My biggest problem was to get what i wanted in the local phone shop in a language i don't speak.

Here's my experience.

[inquisitor]

Originally Posted by pete_l

[*]Here's the killer. The data link is GPRS only. Not 3G: just modem speeds of 3 or 4 kByte/second. Simyo never tell you this and it's not at all obvious from the stuff they send you. One small giveaway is that you have to set the APN to gprs-service.com

Since I'm in need of Spanish SIM for a 3-weeks-stay in Gran Canaria, I checked several Spanish websites (e.g. Simyo lanza su tarifa plana de internet) including simyo's, where it clearly states, that bandwidth amounts to 3.6 MBit/s. Also the coverage map of simyo explicitly shows 3G coverage.
The APN "gprs-service.com" also applies for simyo's postpaid data plan (€ 24.99/month sin impuestos), which definitley provides HSDPA-speed.
Did you guys just happen to be outside of 3G coverage or was the serving cell just congested?

[petkow]

Simyo have changed tariff since 4th Feb. Old users who registered their cards before this date still get the 5Euro tariff. For the rest, it has lost so much value it's not even worth talking about any more. It is now 17,99 for 1GB. That coupled with useless customer service muppets, means Simyo is now officially a terrible choice for travellers. (Unless of course you still have one of the old SIM's).

Also, I know this is an old thread but it's been a while since I've been back to this thread as I have been quite tied up. However, I've just read some of the posts above, and wanted to post in order to set the record of this thread straight on something and confirm what Inquisitor has been saying above.

Firstly, it is completely untrue that Simyo is a GPRS only service. It uses Orange, and it all depends on whether you can get Orange UMTS coverage where you are located or not. Until recently, I have been using high speed UMTS through Simyo for VoIP, maps and mobile browsing on a more or less daily basis. AFIK I have never been overcharged. I am only not using it now as I am temporarily outside of Spain.

I think user gaidal had a particularly bad experience, but it is not representative of the normal service. He admits his iPhone was set up on auto-email-retrieve every 15 minutes. Because of the high block size of 256k, Simyo is just not suited to this. For him 4 tiny connections will already be 1MB, even though the real data transmitted will be a few kilobytes!

[petkow]

Originally Posted by laptopnomad

It gives me 3.1Gb of 3G for € 93,- (ex tax) a month with a daily limit of 100 Mb - after which speeds drops to GPRS alike. It's not the cheapest I know.

Again, apologies for this revival of this old thread but WTF!!! I am just stunned at this rate!! How do Yoigo charge 100 odd euros (with tax) for 3 Gig of data??!! That has to be the poorest value I have ever heard of in Spain.

[pete_l]

Here's the killer. The data link is GPRS only

Update: Jan 2010. It turns out there's an extra field needed in the dongle initilaisation. From memory, it's *99# (though don't quote me, it's close but probably not that EXACT string) which turns on 3G / HSDPA mode. With this inserted, the dongle flies - sometimes.

[petkow]

Strange. What dongle are you finally using? What firmware/software does it have? Normally there is no need at all to activate HSDPA on any 3G Modem.

Weren't you previously tethering your GPRS-only phone to a PC? You mentioned above that none of your UK based dongles worked. I assume you bought another one then?

It's unfortunate that you seem to be having all these problems, which seem so unrepresentative of my experiences. In my case, I just popped a Simyo SIM into a cheap E169 (bought in an o2 shop in the UK) and was on the internet in minutes. The only change I did was to reflash the device to get rid of the o2 software and instead made it run the original "Mobile Partner" software. Then I put the "gprs-service.com" APN in, and I had HSDPA speeds straight away! I also have it running on my 3G phone at times. Still high speed!

[inquisitor]

Is anyone of you aware of a USSD-code (e.g. *100#) to check the remaining credit of a simyo SIM?

[Lucy]

I'll be in Spain for just a week, at hotels, and will likely not be at a place when the delivery arrives to sign and show passport.

So what is the second best to Simyo? Something readily available in shops. I'll be traveling with someone so we will both get sims and a large part of our calls will be to each other.

I noticed Eroski Movil and Pepephone as possibilities.