Mobile Plan Advice

Hello,
My daughter is starting Oxford this fall and we live in the USA right now. We are exploring mobile plans for her. She has an iPhone and is not looking to get a phone and hence interested in sim only plans. Any tips or advice would be great.

Reply 1

eeeli

13

I think in a previous thread (and judging by your username) you said your daughter was going to Corpus. One piece of advice I can give is that the phone signal in the main accommodation block for first years was notoriously terrible (when I lived there in 2020/21), I barely knew anyone who could get service in there! Luckily the Wi-fi in there is fairly reliable so there are many ways to keep in touch over the internet.
I use giffgaff which worked great in the rest of the city. Its pretty cheap, sim only, and the monthly rolling version allows you to switch plans if you need more/less data and pause the monthly plans altogether (which may be useful if she doesn't need the UK sim if she goes home to the USA in the vacations?). All the plans come with unlimited UK texts and calls too. I'm not sure how good they are for international calls/texts but to be honest you'd be better off keeping in touch over the internet (e.g. Whatsapp calls and texts) rather than using mobile service calls and texts as that can get pretty expensive.

Reply 2

Oxfordcorpus

OP

6

You are absolutely right. She is going to Corpus. Thanks for input on the phone signal at Corpus. The goal would be to use internet to stay in touch with family and friends and never have to use service calls and texts. It would be awesome to pause the plan every time she travels back home. Will check out giffgaff and see how it works for her. One challenge she is struggling is to estimate how much data would she need each month. Her goal is to start with some where in the average range and then roll up or down depending on what really happens once she starts at Oxford.

Reply 3

eeeli

13

Original post by Oxfordcorpus

You are absolutely right. She is going to Corpus. Thanks for input on the phone signal at Corpus. The goal would be to use internet to stay in touch with family and friends and never have to use service calls and texts. It would be awesome to pause the plan every time she travels back home. Will check out giffgaff and see how it works for her. One challenge she is struggling is to estimate how much data would she need each month. Her goal is to start with some where in the average range and then roll up or down depending on what really happens once she starts at Oxford.

She probably wouldn’t need much data - all university buildings have a Wifi network called eduroam and since there are so many scattered across the city you can get Wifi in a lot of places if you’re a student at the uni. I have 20GB a month for £10 and I’ve never really come close to using all of it in a month but it was nice to have a good amount of data as backup if eduroam went down while I was in the library studying or something which it does very occasionally do!

Reply 4

Oxfordcorpus

OP

6

Perfect. We can start with 20GB a month and then adjust as needed. Thanks for all your input.

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