Three UK Remove Essential Mobile Plans and Cut 100GB SIM Price

Mobile operator Three UK has informed us that their cheapest ‘Essential’ plans will today be withdrawn from sale in order to “simplify” their tariffs by focusing on ‘Advanced’ plans. On the upside the provider plans to cut the price of their 4G data based 30GB and 100GB plans.

At present the key difference between Three UK’s Essential and Advanced plans is their flexibility and add-ons. The Advanced plans all offer mobile roaming in 71 destinations at no extra cost, Tethering, as well as “Go Binge” that allows you to stream Netflix, Apple music, Deezer, Soundcloud and more “without using your data.”

By comparison the Essential plans forgo all those extras and only focus on the basics of smaller data allowances and reduced calling minutes (plus unlimited texts). Not everybody sees a need for the extras touted on their Advanced plans and so the decision to remove them from sale to new subscribers (doesn’t affect existing customers) will come as quite a surprise.

Typically the Advanced SIM Only plans start at about £16 per month, while the Essential plans with smaller allowances start at just £9 per month. At the time of writing (their website hasn’t been updated yet) it’s unclear whether Three UK will now adjust their Advanced plans to cater for budget users who just want a fairly normal mobile plan at a low cost, although we’d be very surprised if they left that segment neglected.

Thankfully there is also some better news today, which is that the operator has cut the price of their 12-month SIM Only Advanced plans with 30GB (currently £18) or 100GB (currently £31) of mobile broadband data to just £17 and £20 per month respectively. The special discount doesn’t have an end date but the operator has suggested that it will be available to order for at least the next 4 weeks.

UPDATE 10:07am

Three has now updated their website and by the looks of it the cheaper plans are still present, although they’ve re-labelled them all as ‘Advanced’ plans and added Tethering + global roaming support. But other features like “Go Binge” only appear on the bigger plans from 12GB of data upwards.