Data Tariffs

I’ve been doing some research into data tariffs in the UK as all these mobile games obviously require a data connection to operate. Not as easy as I thought – why do the mobile phone companies insist on making this information so hard to find *sigh*. Anyway, I’ve found one or two that appear pretty competitive and to be honest, the mobile casinos and poker rooms don’t do a massive amount of fata transfer during play anyway so it’s not so bad. The biggest data download comes on the initial install and setup and even then you’re talking 250kb average per game or lobby install.

These mobile casinos and poker rooms will run on the tariffs below:

The primary data connection that most gamblers will use on their mobile phones for casinos and poker play is GPRS although sports bettors will probably use their WAP capability and if you are like me and have a wifi-enabled phone (mine is a Nokia N80), you can actually do all the installation and setup at home over a wireless network, thus alleviating the cost of data transfer. Rates clearly will vary depending if you are on “Pay As You Go” (PAYG) as I am, or on a contract. For someone who is likely to gamble a fair bit on the phone, a contract option may be the way to go and Vodaphone appear to have the best offer that I can find right now for contract customers, while easily the best PAYG deal I have found here is on Virgin Mobile.

Contract Tariffs

As of the 18th July 2007, Vodaphone have introduced an “unlimited” data tariff contract of £25 a month (I say unlimited but there is a “fair use” policy that doesn’t seem to be very clear – I would guess a Gig a month but check). Additionally they have introduced an add-on that, for £8.50, allows 24hr unlimited data access from abroad.

Three offer specific data contracts via their “X-Series” contracts. The problem with the latter is that you are very restricted on the choice of phone, although contracts start at £20 a month rising to £35 deending on how much data/calls you want.

Pay As You Go Data Tariffs

Virgin Mobile offer a £5 per Megabyte fixed contract rate which is cheaper than anyone right now. Another benefit of the Virgin Mobile data tariffs is that the £5 per meg rate also applies if you are travelling abroad. Very neat. Most other operators charge an overhead for overseas GPRS data usage.

Orange have supposedly released a number of new tariffs that are more targetted towards data users too - but they don’t seem very keen to tell you about them! I wandered around their website and through their brochures and eventually went and spoke to a salesman who told me, baguely, that the new packages allow you to store X megabytes for use at any time, but couldn’t tell me how much they were, whether it included roaming abroad and basic stuff like that. I’d be dead surprised if it beats the Virgin offer to be honest.

What I did glean from their latest brochure was that they have a Business package called “Business Everywhere” that reduces the cost of each megabyte, but more than that is hard to fathom.