Three for T (-mobile) : [UK mobile networks]
I moved to T-mobile nearly 2 years ago, and have been pretty happy with their service, and the plan that I chose. However, we are currently on a family trip outside of the UK, and upon arriving in Ireland I was greeted with a familiar text warning. For internet use outside of the UK please insert £3 per day for 100MB of data.
Thankfully, a friend recently put me on to Three’s amazing new price plans, which include a rolling monthly plan with all-you-can-eat-data for £15, and for a short-list of countries outside of the UK, you can use this unlimited data while travelling.
So, for this trip I wanted to try it out, and came prepared with and old phone, a free SIM card from Three, and I had purchased the £15 add-on which along with various hundred of minutes and thousands of texts gave me this unlimited data. Which resulted in this lovely text message from Three as we arrived in Ireland:
Great news indeed: “get online for no extra cost using your inclusive plan”.
So for the last day or so, I’ve been using my Three SIM-carded phone as a wi-fi hub, to provide data connectivity to our numerous devices, including our galaxy camera with built in dropbox. Based on the Usage data from the phone we have so far used around 3.4GB. Which at T-mobile’s £3 per 100MB would have been over £100 already!
Fortunately, my T-mobile contract is close to it’s renewal date, and so unless anything exceptional occurs with Three – I’m looking forward to porting my regular number and moving over to Three.
[update 2014-04-06]
Final tally of data used over the week was over 20GB, using my phone as a wifi hub for all the rest of our devices 
Three’s website is really hard to use, and even when logging in to my account have some bizarre usability issues with iFrames, but here is the current list of countries you can use your UK allowances in:
“We’ve also arranged for you to take your UK plan’s allowance and any Add-on allowance with you to eleven destinations (Austria, Denmark, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Italy, Macau, the Republic of Ireland, Sri Lanka, Sweden and the USA) ”
n.b.: Web Performance front and center! Tethering my MacBook Pro to a mobile network certainly brings into sharp relief the importance of web performance considerations when developing websites : see my post on the difference you can make to your site performance in just one hour at http://allbs.co.uk/2013/05/19/web-performance-optimisation-hour-1/