help me understand Smartone's per hour data charges

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  1. #1

    Question help me understand Smartone's per hour data charges

    I'm in Hong Kong for the next five months and right now I'm using a 3 sim card. I want to compare it to the other 3g prepaid companies but I'm having trouble understanding smartone's data charges by the hour. What constitutes using data under this scheme? Does having an open push mail connection mean that i am using data 24 hours a day?


  2. #2

    Join Date
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    Push email would count if data is coming in although smartone will cap the data charge after 3 hours for the rest of the day.

    Take a look at one2free prepaid also as they offer unlimited data for 7 days (the best prepaid dat I've seen in hk)


  3. #3

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    yep, if I were you I would not any further than the one2free prepaid. 2nd best network provider in HK.


  4. #4

    who's the first?


  5. #5

    Join Date
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    Quote Originally Posted by student33:
    who's the first?
    1010.

    Both 1010 and One2Free are on the CSL network, but 1010 has network priority.

  6. #6

    ignoring the charging caps and data passes, which is cheaper; $8 an hour or $2 a mb?


  7. #7
    Quote Originally Posted by student33:
    ignoring the charging caps and data passes, which is cheaper; $8 an hour or $2 a mb?
    The BBC homepage is almost 1 MB (give or take) so say you go on there and then read a story and hop back to homepage (does it reload and nail you the ~1MB) it could be a pretty expensive read.

    A typical smartphone user typically uses about 1GByte/month (1000MB) or about 30MB/day...
    A normal PC/data dongle user would be many times that - it you stream video or bit torrent etc it could easily be 10,000-100,000MByte/month.

    So go for the hourly rate and logoff after your done.

  8. #8

    I think hourly rate is better too
    However, I will pick Smartone one, which provides $8/hr and with daily cap at $24, if your consumption up to $24, you can enjoy unlimited data on that day.

    BTW, 1010 and one2free are sharing the same network, how comes 1010 is better than one2free. Moreover, my fds said HK's media always reported complaints from 1010 and one2free's customers about bill shock. so i won't pick them~~


  9. #9

    people I know were doing throughput testing on 1010 with unlimited SIM and got nailed thousands of dollars even though they has 'unlimited' plan.

    personally i wouldn't give CSL the time of day - but i have a work LTE phone and it can pump about 40Mbps... So I can burn through my whole 5GByte/month in 16 minutes....

    I am not so naive to trust them with the definition of unlimted...


  10. #10

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    Quote Originally Posted by zerocred:
    people I know were doing throughput testing on 1010 with unlimited SIM and got nailed thousands of dollars even though they has 'unlimited' plan.

    personally i wouldn't give CSL the time of day - but i have a work LTE phone and it can pump about 40Mbps... So I can burn through my whole 5GByte/month in 16 minutes....

    I am not so naive to trust them with the definition of unlimted...
    With the operators rolling out LTE this year (CSL already has it), its going to be interesting, as you have pointed out the download speeds are much faster with it, and now all the operators have pretty much capped their fast data at 5GB.