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How often do you change your mobile phone plan? (lemmy.ca)

submitted 8 months ago by CanadianCabbage@lemmy.ca to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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I feel like every two years I need to call my carrier and complain if I want a decent deal. They will do things like upgrade my plan on their website to have 10 extra gigabytes of data but won't upgrade me to it until I contact them. There's also all the new member exclusive deals that I feel make it impractical to just sit on one plan for an extended period of time.

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[–] user224@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 8 months ago

I've had the same plan for past 4 years. It's also my first plan I had.

Originally €12/month, but the price increased to €13/month. If I was to get it now, it would be €15/month. It's a data-only plan, but it gets me 300GB/month.
Unfortunately, my speeds are heavily crippled after shutdown of 3G. My carrier (Swan) only has 2G and 4G, but they had a contract with Orange for national roaming in their 2G and 3G networks. The FUP here was limited to 20GB, however in reality they allowed 40GB, as confirmed by the carrier (language: Slovak). The 3G offered far superior speeds during the day (30Mbps down as opposed to 1Mbps on 4G).

Last month however, Orange shut down 3G. There's now a new contract in place, allowing use of Orange's 4G network except the 800MHz band. So... what's the problem? It's not done in the way of "national roaming" anymore. Instead the phone signs into Orange's towers like native network. This also means I cannot explicitly use Orange's network anymore by selecting it in "Mobile networks" setting.
Apparently, this was done to allow for "smoother experience while switching networks".
I know a lot of people, including me, were using Orange's network for faster speeds like this.

But all hope is not lost, if you have MediaTek SoC, or a rooted Qualcomm device. For the latter, you should be able to use network signal guru.
For the former, *#*#3646633#*#* and head into band mode.
Here's the trick: The network is clearly set up to prefer cell towers owned by Swan, unless it is absolutely necessary to use Orange. But Swan only has towers in 1800MHz (B3) band. If you disallow that band, it is suddenly absolutely necessary to use one of the Orange's towers. Tada! Faster network speeds.
And also a warning: The carrier may not like you doing stuff like this. In fact, they may hate it, and ban you from using the network. There's not enough info whether that actually happens or not.

This kind of reminds me of an old PRL hacking article I've seen.
But anyway, it seems like these Orange towers may be doing some slight load balancing, as the speeds are now around 4-6Mbps during the day on home network. Still... 50Mbps on Orange towers.

Anyway, sorry, I got kind of off topic.
TL;DR: Never. My plan is cheap though slow. [Bunch of text] But it got a bit better.