I'm travelling to the UK soon and thought I'd share how I ordered an LTE SIM that comes with unlimited talk and text, Premium Voice for incoming calls and 2250MB of data, all for the grand sum of 1 penny (both UK penny and US penny (cent)).
First, it helps that I have access to a UK address.
Second, I went to my credit card account online and changed my residence address to that UK address. Conveniently, this is just an address for residence purposes. The mailing address stays in the US.
Third, I googled "freedompop uk 1p" to find a link to the offer landing page.
Fourth, I used my credit card providers virtual number generator to create credit card details that protect me in the event that FreedomPop make any mistakes and try to charge me when they shouldn't.
FreedomPop do not seem to allow delivering to a UK address while paying with a US credit card. I think this used to be possible, but when it came time to order the SIM, I could not see a way to do this so had to change the address of my credit card to a UK one.
The UK freedompop interface is far more modern and slick and I even found an option where you can cancel the account.
Interestingly, even if I needed the SIM for more than a month, the unlimited talk and text and 2250MB data package with incoming Premium Voice runs at $9 a month. Not bad at all especially since you can add another 500MB monthly through donations from other SIMs. However, instead of the automatic 50MB monthly for each freedom friend, it appears in the UK you only get 10MB per friend.
The UK has very cheap plans and you can buy full LTE data quite inexpensively. I think the freedompop sim is only HSDA and not LTE in the UK but it is still decent in most places.
You can even get three UK mobile broadband with 12gb for 12 months for about $45 off ebay if you want it in advance. Or a paygo sim with calling and texting gives you 12gb for a month for 20gbp or unlimited data for 25gbp. Tello has cheaper plans if you want less data. If you have any data left on your three sim you can use it when you get back to the USA as well.
FreedomPop in the UK use the "Three" network. I believe it is LTE. I'll find out soon enough.
Thanks for the info on the other options. May come in useful in future! Tello give 3GB for GBP7. That's competitive with FreedomPop's GBP7 a month for unlimited talk, text and 2250MB.
I may have read somewhere that, in general, British people have approximately five time as many friends as do American people. Go figure, and it works out in the end. Determining people's worth in MBs is not very humane.
:unsure: Friendship paradox: Friendship has always been paradoxical in many ways, but it is good to see that the mathematics applied to online friendships(whatever they may be) is leading to beneficial results, such as predicting and hopefully curtailing the devastation wrought by killer viral contagions. Maybe there is a chance that this math will help us understand and help us avoid becoming extinct during the ongoing 6th mass extinction, as well as help mitigate our demise from global climate change.
I'm not sure if I shoud be sad or happy that I do not have a facebook account and am missing out on the 69 billion friendships that are located there. I prefer to just think of myself as a lover of mankind and leave it at that. Seriously, though, there must be a distinction between "true" friendship and "online" friendship, for how can one possibly have 635 friends or more. People used ask what friend(s) one would want to share a foxhole with when your life depended on them. Now there certainly is strength in numbers, but 635 people in one foxhole is a bit too much. People also used to say that they could count the number of their true friends on one hand. I suppose this finger counting math has gone the way of the Dodo and been replaced by the social, friendship paradox math. But friendship does remain paradoxical, no matter how one looks at it. Narcissists have it made, for everyone likes them, including ones truly. I wonder if the "friendship math" also applies to non-friends or people one dislikes. I'm not sure what any of this has to do with FreedomPop.
I'm reporting back on my Freedompop UK experience.
The Premier service proved very useful both for making and receiving real phone calls and data compression. Data compression meant we used less data than we would have in the US. We used 1GB - 1.7GB each in 3 weeks and had a trial allotment of 2.2GB. I think we also made some savings thanks to the availability of free wi-fi in many places.
The freedompop website as well as the regular freedompop app provides a better and richer experience for the UK sim. The website in particular is very different. I was going to cancel the sims but decided to downgrade them instead. That was very easy and I received a confirmation email for the plan downgrade immediately. The email warns that only a plan has been downgraded and services have to be downgraded separately and that if you have multiple accounts, you should be sure you've downgraded in the correct account.
Since I didn't receive confirmation that the Premier service has been downgraded, I accessed the billing page on the website which confirmed that my next bill is zero. All in all, light years ahead of the US website and much less misleading. I strongly suspect that UK regulatory authorities are much less forgiving of website tricks and misleading tactics than their US counterparts.
Oh okay I see. The whatsapp sim is probably the same as what they sell over here as the global sim. That is why I was a bit confused. Just like the US the UK has its own LTE sim. Nice. I might just have to get one for the next time I am over. I have a three uk sim (not freedompop) already from a decade ago that still works. It gives a small amount of free data when you add credit which is nice.
