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Mobile Phone contracts

I am not sure whether it's a teenage thing, but a lot of the people I know have phone contracts as in handset + air time, 24mths that exceed £30 pcm. To me, this seems like an exorbitant amount of money, but the impression I get from speaking to them is "it's nothing". I'm trying to establish in my mind whether it's down to parents paying and therefore them not "seeing" the true cost. Either that, or it's become so established, so expected that people feel they have to have it, regardless of the cost.

The basis of this comes from a little survey I came up with. If I say I get £40 a month pocket money, they'd immediately say: "that's loads" (even when told that was total income eg no birthday/christmas cash). SO I'd ask them how much they'd get and usually get an answer between £20 and 30. After that, I ask about phone contract cost. The vast majority of people have no idea! Those that do were all on £30+. When I proceeded to explain how much that worked out to be over the contract period, the automatic response was just to shrug it off, almost as a "necessary expense". From that, then, we can establish they neither see the cost, nor query the necessity of the cost.

The iPhone 6, especially, cements this feeling in my mind. The lowest cost contracts I've seen are close to £40 pcm with an upfront cost, and they are already beginning to penetrate the market pretty quickly. And I can guarantee you one thing: a significant amount of the users (certainly that I know), will still have a contract on an iPhone 5, for example, still ongoing.

This seems to span the whole economic spectrum: I've asked people whose household income is sub 15k and those with incomes in excess of 100k.

How best to conclude this... "Out of sight, out of mind" seems to be the best, but with a helping of peer pressure and, it could be argued: the mindless following of advertisements.

What mobile contracts do you possess...?
 
None for the phone - I use 3's PAYG offering.
Mobile broadband I keep completely separate, don't use the phone for it at all - for broadband I'm on a one month contract with EE (£30, 25GB), and I wouldn't touch a 24 month contract for *anything*.
 
I tend to wait a year or two after a phone I want comes out, ideally holding for a good "sale" offer, then buy the phone separately and take a SIM-only contract. But I'm still left to debate whether or not the "value" proposition is in my favour since the price difference between a bundled phone and sim-only contract is not as wide as I'd like.

The real question for me is how much data and included minutes I require. If you make a lot of use of your voice and data allowance then an expensive contract that comes with a phone could make good sense, since again the difference between a sim-only and bundled option is not always as appreciably wide to compensate for the first-hand value of the handset. But the choices do vary so I think you'd have to apply this to every contract option and phone in order to see which gives the best balance in terms of value.

PS - £40 a month pocket money? My parents didn't give me anything until I was about 18, except a packet of Polos.. if I was lucky :). £40 would be a sizeable percentage of most people’s monthly income, given how low the average wage is.
 
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"The real question for me is how much data and included minutes I require." This is another thing that humours me about teenagers. They seem to think they need unlimited minutes and texts, but 'only' 1GB if data or so. When I showed them some of 3's plans, they gasped in horror at the thought of a mere 6000 texts, 500 mins and 'who cares' unlimited data. This is despite the average number of texts they send per month is maybe 1000, minutes 20-30 but data they're always complaining they've nearly run out! The number of texts is going to go up either; the majority of messaging I see is over FB messenger (an app which updates ever day and uses an insane amount of data for what it actually does)

Sometimes the bundled option can work out a lot cheaper, certainly with the iPhone 5s + vodafone SIM only contract that I weighed up a few months ago: there was something like a £200 difference...

I'm on 3's PAYG at the moment and go through around £10 of credit every two months. However, in the past when I've converted £15 topup to an all in one plan, I've then used an insane amount of data, so the more data I have, the more I'll use!

It doesn't work out to be £40 pcm, that was just a figure more than the contract to then get the conversion started.
 
"I'm on 3's PAYG at the moment and go through around £10 of credit every two months."
Gasbag ;)
I've only used £2.21 since activating my 3 SIM just over six months ago, despite having ditched the landline a few months ago.
The Virgin SIM that I used in the past, which I added £10 to (taking it to about £12) when I moved home in 2006 as I knew it would be a fortnight before the ordinary phone was put in, is still sat in the old Nokia 3210 with £1.47 on it.
 
Giffgaff £7.50 a month (and I rarely use half of the allowance); and a Lenovo clone that cost £60.

Of course the boss doesnt know I am using the works Wifi when I am there, and my Wifi when at home, and the phone is set to search for any unencrypted networks when out and about.
 
setup.custard-Probably 10p per month is spent on voice calls!
Captain_cretin-I'm a BT broadband customer, so my phone automatically hops onto their hotspots (often when there are encrypted, stronger networks I have access to near by)
 
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"Probably 10p per month is spent on voice calls!"
Ah, well, there's the big difference between you and me - I don't use the phone for anything except voice calls.
When I became aware of 3's "3-2-1" PAYG tariff and thought "Aha - that's what I need for future use when the Virgin one dies", I needed a new phone, because the 3 SIM will only work in a 3G-capable phone, and my fourteen year-old Nokia 3210 didn't recognise the existence of 3G. So, what did I buy?
After fishing around and rejecting umpteen phones that (to my old-fashioned way of thinking) were just gimmick boxes, I got hold of a Doro 614 which was going cheap. Not because I needed the big buttons which Doro are best known for, but because...
(a) I like the clamshell design, no danger of screen damage when carelessly stuffed in my pocket along with the doorkeys etc.
(b) It has NO camera.
(c) It does NOT do internet.
(d) You can SWITCH OFF MESSAGING in the menu, so if some misguided person is fool enough to send me a text message I don't even know about it.
Bliss. :)
 
Last edited:
Oh - forgot to mention, as it's not something relevant to the choice of phone itself, but I got 3 to KILL VOICEMAIL too.
:)

I had to KILL voicemail on Giff Gaff too, for some STUPID reason they charge to retrieve voicemail, and I get some IDIOTIC companies to leave message(s) about PPI and other nonsense.., and you can't clear it, without paying for it !!!
Bring back the old Virgin and Orange system when you could SEND and receive voicemail for FREE !
They did it for years, Orange about 10 years, so clearly it does noy cost them money....
Regards,
Martin
 
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