Tradesmen.ie Blog

This month we’ll try to help you save money on your mobile phone bill.

The key to comparing the mobile phone prices was to understand the cost of calls, texts and Internet within each of the bundles first of all so then we could easily add or subtract them from the bundle later.

I won’t cover all of the bundles but I will cover what I consider to be the most popular ones and if anyone wants me to compare more afterwards just ask me and I’ll do it.

Mobile Market Share in Ireland
The first thing we need to do is find out the statistics on what percentage of the Irish market each of the mobile networks have so that we can work out how much it costs to make calls and send texts using their free bundles. I did this by taking a sample 10,000 jobs that were posted on Tradesmen.ie over the last 12 months and added up how many mobile numbers were 087, how many were 086, how many were 085, 083 and 089. The results were as follows: O2 (39%), Vodafone (49%), Meteor (<10%), Three (<1%), Tesco Mobile (<1%).

€20 Pay as you Go
Today we’ll look at Pay as you Go plans for all of the Irish Networks.  Here are the range of plans that fall into the €20 top up category below:-

O2
Let’s start first with o2, they have a pay as you go plan for €20 per month which gives free 02 to 02 calls and texts and it’s 30cent per minute to call other networks and 13cent to text other networks.

Meteor
Meteor have a pay as you go plan for €20 per month which gives free Meteor to Meteor calls and texts and it’s 29 cent per minute to call other networks and 12cent to text other networks.

Vodafone
Vodafone have a pay as you go plan for €20 per month which gives free Vodafone to Vodafone calls and texts and it’s 29 cent per minute to call other networks and 13cent to text other networks.

Tesco Mobile
Tesco Mobile have a pay as you go plan for €20 per month which gives free Tesco to Tesco calls and texts and it’s 20 cent per minute to call other networks and 9cent to text other networks.

Three Mobile
Three Mobile have a pay as you go plan for €20 per month which gives free Three to Three calls and free texts to any network and it’s 29 cent per minute to call other networks and you have free unlimited Internet usage.

Let’s see what the call charges are above based on our survey of mobile phone usage on Tradesmen.ie:-

O2 Charges
With O2 if you make and equal number of calls and texts and you make 39% of calls and texts to O2 users and 61% of calls and texts to other networks then the following will happen:- You will get 33 minutes of chargeable calls and 21 minutes of free calls. This is a total of 54 minutes of calls for €10 or an average of 18.5 cents per minute. You will get 77 chargeable text messages and 49 free text messages so this works out at a total of 126 text messages for €10 or an average of 7.9 cent per text message.

Meteor Charges
With Meteor if you make and equal number of calls and texts and you make 10% of calls and texts to Meteor users and 90% of calls and texts to other networks then the following will happen:- You will get 34.5 minutes of chargeable calls and 3.8 minutes of free calls. This is a total of 38.3 minutes of calls for €10 or an average of 26 cents per minute. You will get 83 chargeable text messages and 9 free text messages so this works out at a total of 92 text messages for €10 or an average of 10.9 cent per text message.

Tesco Mobile Charges
With Tesco if you make and equal number of calls and texts and you make 1% of calls and texts to Tesco users and 99% of calls and texts to other networks then the following will happen:- You will get 50 minutes of chargeable calls and 0.5 minutes of free calls. This is a total of 50.5 minutes of calls for €10 or an average of 19.8 cents per minute. You will get 111 chargeable text messages and 1.1 free text messages so this works out at a total of 112 text messages for €10 or an average of 8.9 cent per text message.

Three Mobile Charges
You have free unlimited Internet usage and free unlimited text messages to any network with Three so for example if you use 1GB of data I am going to subtract €10 from the price plan and let’s say you send 250 text messages so I will deduct another €1 for this. The remaining calls will be used from the €10 that’s left. If you are going to use the Internet and text messages a lot I would recommend Three for sure. Therefore with Three and our remaining €9 worth of credit, if you make make 1% of calls to Three users and 99% of calls to other networks then the following will happen:- You will get 31 minutes of chargeable calls and 0.3 minutes of free calls. This is a total of 31.3 minutes of calls for €9 or an average of 28.7 cents per minute. You will get unlimited free text messages to any network.

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 34.5 minutes of chargeable calls and 33 minutes of free calls. This is a total of 67.5 minutes of calls for €10 or an average of 15 cents per minute. You will get 77 chargeable text messages and 74 free text messages so this works out at a total of 151 text messages for €10 or an average of 6.62cent per text message.

Summary for €20 Pay as you Go
As you can see from the above examples if you make most calls and texts to the Vodafone network it’s best to go with Vodafone but if a lot of your friends use one network more than the others then go with that one that most of your friends use. If you mostly send text messages and use the Internet then Three would be the one to go for as it has free texts to any network and unlimited Internet Browsing. I will cover Bill pay options over the next few days, there’s a huge lot of money to be saved on Bill Pay and of course Bill Pay is a lot cheaper than pay as you go.

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
Tradesmen.ie

You can find Compare Mobile Plans II here

All information for the above article was found on the following URLs:-
http://www.vodafone.ie/planscosts/prepay/current/

http://www.o2online.ie/o2/shop/plans/

http://www.meteor.ie/pay-as-you-go/

http://www.tescomobile.ie/OurPricePlans.aspx

http://www.three.ie/products_services/priceplans/prepay/index.html

(Oct 2011, prices have changed, please see latest electricity price comparison here)

With all the talk in the news last week about a hike in electricity prices
we decided to carry out our own price comparison on electricity prices in Ireland
(well we help to compare prices for tradesmen so why not help you save money
on electricity as well!:)). We wanted to see what the price difference was between
the 3 main suppliers to the Irish market i.e. ESB Electric Ireland, Airtricity
and Board Gais. We based our calculations on the standard rate for each supplier.
There are many different tariffs and although we show only 2 categories in our
comparison, the differences were pretty much the same for all categories. Therefore
the most expensive supplier in the standard category turned out to be the most
expensive in all of the other categories that we looked at as well.

Table 1

As you can see in table 1 Board Gais is the most expensive on both Standard
and Saving plans at almost 2cent per unit higher than both ESB Electric and
Board Gais on the Standard tarriff.

Table 2

As you can see in Table 2 the standing charges are very similar for all 3 suppliers
but Board Gais works out the most expensive in all the examples above.

Table 3

Table 3 is a summary of the information in Table 1 and Table
2. Again it shows that Board Gais is the most expensive in our July 2011 comparison
(ok August 1st) costing up to €24 more than ESB Electric and Airtricity for 1200
units of electricity for 2 months which works out at about €144 per annum. ESB Electric is 2 to 3 euro cheaper than Airtricity according to our calculations above which probably isn’t enough to make you want to switch but if you are with Board Gais it looks like you’d be better off to switch to one of the others.

It is important also to make the point that nomatter
which provider you are with that you should switch to direct debit and online
billing (ebill) to avail of the maximum savings from all suppliers. You can save
up to 14% per annum using ebill and direct debit with Airtricity (price reduces
to 13.77 cent per unit) and up to 14.25% with ESB Electric (price reduces to 3.72
cent per unit). On the examples above you can save up to €180 per annum
by switching to direct debit and online billing.

Regards
Oliver Dempsey
Tradesmen.ie

E&OE. Prices were taken from the supplier websites on 15 July 2011.  If you have any comments to make please feel free to so below.

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