This month we’re helping you save money on your mobile phone bill. In today’s earlier article I compared mobile price plans for Irish Pay as You Go plans. In this article I will have a look at some of the bill pay plans. You can see the earlier ‘Pay as You Go’ comparison here
€20 Bill Pay
The secret to comparing the offerings here is to understand the individual costs of calls, texts and Internet. If you look at any of the networks in Ireland they will charge about 9-13cents for texts outside of the bundle and 20 – 30cents for calls outside of the bundle and approximately €5 per 250MBs outside of the bundle. In order to calculate here I took the ratio of the cost of 1 text message versus 1 call minute versus 10MBs of data and the ratio that I came up with is as follows:- 1:2.5:1.
Mobile Minutes:Texts:Internet Cost Ratio
I based this on the fact that texts outside of bundles are commonly priced at 10cent per text and calls outside of the bundle are commonly charged at 25 – 30 cent per minute. You can get 1GB Internet as an add on for about €10 so €10/1000MBs = 1cent/MB or 10cent for 10MB. Therefore 1text=10cent:1minute=25cent:10MBs=10cent. If you divide across by 10 you get 1:2.5:1. I then used this ratio to compare price plans and take out or leave in certain components of the price plan based on this ratio.
As a rough rule of thumb you can work out that the bill pay bundles will give you text messages for 4 cent per text, voice for 10 cent per minute and 250MBs for about €2.50. However you can get texts for as little as 2cent per text and voice for as little as 6cent per minute so keep a close eye on the figures below to see what I mean;)
O2
O2 have a bill pay plan Called Simplicity (looks like a 30 day contract) for €20 per month which gives 150 free calls and 150 free texts and it’s 30cent per minute to call over and above your free minutes and 13cent to text over and above your free texts.
Meteor
Meteor have a sim only bill pay plan called Bill Pay Smart Lite for €25 per month which gives 200 free calls and 200 free texts and 1GB Internet included. It’s 25 cent per minute to call over and above your free minutes and 10 cent to text over and above your free texts.
Vodafone
Vodafone have a sim only bill pay plan called Simply 100 (30 day contract) for €20 per month which gives 100 free calls and 100 free texts and it’s 30cent per minute to call over and above your free minutes and 11 cent to text over and above your free texts. This plan includes free anytime calls and texts to the Vodafone network.
Tesco Mobile
I couldn’t see any bill pay options for Tesco Mobile
Three Mobile
Three don’t have a €20 bill pay plan (I will cover their €30 offering in the next article)
Comparing Call and Text Charges on €20 per month Bill Pay
Let’s see what the call charges are above based on our ratio of Call Charges per minute versus Text Charges per text versus Internet Charges per 4MB of 1:2.5:1
O2 Charges
With O2 we can break down the €20 as 150 minutes at 8.5 cents per minute = €12.75 and 150 text messages at 3.4cents each = €5.10 and 250MBs at €2.15.
Meteor Charges
With Meteor we can break down the €25 as 200 minutes at 6.1 cents per minute = €12.20 and 200 text messages at 2.4cents each = €4.80 and 1GBs at €8.
Vodafone Charges
With Vodafone if you make and equal number of calls and texts and you make 49% of calls and texts to Vodafone users and 51% of calls and texts to other networks then the following will happen:- You will get 100 minutes of chargeable calls and 96 minutes of free calls. This is a total of 196 minutes of calls at 7.28 cent per minute = €14.28. You will get 100 chargeable text messages and 96 free text messages so this works out at a total of 196 text messages at 2.9 cent per text = €5.72. You can see how I calculated ratio of calls made to the Vodafone network based on Mobile Market Share here
Summary Bill Pay €20
Well if you’re making use of the Internet and you make an equal number of calls and texts then Meteor wins this one. In fact if you even took the Internet on the Meteor plan to be only worth €5 (it’s worth a lot more) then you are still getting more minutes and more texts with the Meteor plan than the Vodafone plan. If don’t need the Internet then Vodafone is the one to go for. Meteor’s call charges are only 6.1 cents per minute compared with O2’s 8.5cent per minute and Vodafone’s 7.28 cent per minute. Meteor text messages are only 2.4cent each compared with O2’s 3.4cent per text and Vodafone’s 2.9 cent per text. If you use anything like these numbers of texts or minutes per month log onto the Internet as quickly as possible and order the Meteor Bill Pay Smart Lite plan and save yourself a lot of money.
If anyone has any comments or questions or if you disagree with anything I have said please feel free to submit it below. To bookmark this page press CTRL+D in Internet Explorer or Firefox and I’ll add more price plan comparisons over the coming week. Please tweet or share this article if you found it useful.
See you soon!
Cheers
Oliver Dempsey
References
I got the data for the above article on the following pages:-
http://www.o2online.ie/o2/shop/plans/
http://www.vodafone.ie/planscosts/paymonthly/simply/100
http://www.meteor.ie/plans/bill_pay/lite_sim_card/#plans-tab
http://www.tescomobile.ie/OurPricePlans.aspx
http://www.three.ie/products_services/priceplans/billpay/flex_plans.html
Please note that Oliver Dempsey and Tradesmen.ie are not affiliated with any of these companies.
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