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Comment by udp | Hacker News Reader

Also in the UK, and I can't remember the last time I actually bought a phone outright. I resigned myself years ago to paying ~£40/mo for a contract and insurance. Every 2 years I get an upgrade to the latest iPhone.

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I'm in the UK and I buy my phones outright, through my company.

I pay about £15 pcm for unlimited data and more of everything else than I can use. I buy a phone when I feel like it, usually about every 18 months to two years. Currently very happy with my P20 Pro. Advantages (to me) are that I can switch network whenever I feel like it, and I own the phone from day 1.

How do you pay 15£/month for unlimited data? Three had 17£/month (now 30GB for new clients) but I’ve never seen 15£/month for unlimited data.

Errr.... It might be £17. It's a Three business contract that's been running for two or three years now.

I put the unlimited part to the test as well, using it as our home broadband for a few months. 100GB+ and they didn't squeal.

(--edit-- looking at the invoice it's a mess of charges, bonuses and weird discounts, starting at a base price of £34 plus vat, brought down to £17 plus vat, not quite as cheap as I thought and a lot weirder)

How do you get the discount? I opted to keep my personal plan instead of choosing a business plan because it was 34£+VAT, but if with a discount is just 17£+VAT then it’s very interesting.

I wonder if I just called up on a day when the sales guy needed to make up a quota or something.

Looking at what I have on my invoice -

  £34 - Business 900
  £4.167 - Landline 1000 (this on is weird, I have no landline from anyone)
  £4.255 - Broadband Plus (I also don't have broadband from them)
  -£8.511 - '25% Recurring discount'
  -£16.667 - 'Loyalty discount'

Coming out at £17.286 for the lot before VAT, I'm assuming the guy put on some basic charges for the lowest level landline and broadband connections, which were never to be provisioned, to unlock the discounts ... !

I bought an S7 (1 year old) off ebay for ~£300, and I pay £10/month for service (with giffgaff so I can adjust the plan monthly if I need more or less data for a given month).

I don't get an iphone, but it's a fair bit cheaper...

S7 is a solid phone. It launched with a great camera, slim design, great battery life and decent speed.

Sure there is stuff that's better now for games or really pushing it. But for taking some pictures, navigating, podcasts, notetaking, general admin, youtube, messaging etc etc it's still absolutely fine.

I've actually just bought a Moto G6 Play and that's an extraordinary device for the money (£129.99).

4000mAh battery, bigger screen (though not 'better') and can do all the S7 does above without trouble. Camera isn't as good but man it's cheap for what you get.

I have a S7 as well. What phone would you suggest to be better for games? I travel quite a bit for work and while I admit I was quite skeptical of games on the go I now find in them quite a bit of enjoyment.

It would just be my assumption that the latest generation with the fastest processors would be best for games I guess. I'm not sure, I actually acted in another thread what the latest phones with the new fastest processors do with all that power as I'm just a 'typical' user that doesn't really push things. I assume games would take advantage of this extra power.

What would a matching plan cost you without the phone?

I can't speak for Denmark, but at least in Canada it's often hard to tell— the advertised prices all assume you're on contract and paying down a device. So the BYOD price generally is something you have to ask about, or get through the retention department by calling and threatening to cancel.

Vodafone is also offering pretty decent trade-in deals - certainly better than my old phones sitting in a drawer!

This is the funniest thing I've read in a while. I remember the rest of the world mocking the American model for cell phone plans (contract lock-in with high monthly rates in exchange for cheap uogrades) and praising the model used in the UK and most of the EU (no contract, incredibly cheap rates but phones are purchases outright). American carriers finally came around to adopting the UK/EU model in the past few years as people began to become more accepting of the idea that the latest smartphone is worth keeping for more than 2 years if it means halving their monthly service payment and now you're telling me the UK has adopted the old American business model?

I find this to be hilarious for reasons I can't quite articulate but going from a model where service is decoupled from hardware to a model where you're contractually obligated to pay a set bundled fee is a 180 degree switch too inexplicable to ignore.

Australia had the USA's model, and to a certain degree, still has. But it used to be that if you wanted a reasonable amount of data (back in the days where 2 up to 8GB was "reasonable"), you'd be best off to get one of the expensive phones on a plan (say $80-100/mo).

But these days, those expensive plans have 20-30GB a month, whereas I'm still only using the data I was back then, and you can get plans for $20/mo for 4-6GB. So I've now gone to buying the phone outright and getting a cheap plan, and save a ton of $.

I suspect a lot of people are still under the mentality that they need the amount of data included in the more expensive plans, without ever checking that to be the case.

Of course, if you're streaming YouTube/Netflix/music at the high bandwidth rates and not even doing the bare minimum to pull down that data while on WiFi, all bets are off.

The UK hasn't "now adopted" that model. It has existed in european countries for basically forever, it just wasn't/isn't the only choice, and less popular.

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