Meteor giving prepaid data free of charge
It appears that Irish mobile network Meteor are giving full 3G data free of charge.
Chris Kennedy drew my attention to this early today.
Meteor’s standard prepaid data costs €1 a day for 50 megabytes and 2c per kilobyte thereafter.
However its appears that there is a exploit on Meteor’s prepaid data billing system.
Chris has been running full 3G Meteor data for the last 3 days with only 1c credit on his account which is not reducing as you can see from the video below.
It appears that once you keep a positive on your account and keep it below €1 data is free.
A few people suggested that Meteor would retrospectively charge for usage once we added credit to the sim, we added credit and as you can see from below, credit remained as before.
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This happened with o2 a number of years ago with SMS text bundles. Basically when you top-up again the balance is deducted. Have you tried to top up? Its fine if you never need to make calls again .. but I’m sure the red flag will go up when the balance goes past a certain level.
I heard there were similar issues/fixes in Europe where http would be blocked when the balance ran out. But people found ways to tunnel IP via DNS.
Shocking stuff!
That would make no sense though long term Jason
buy a sim from Meteor
put ten euro on it and enjoy totally free data
use it as a data sim and you are good to go
Next test - does it work while roaming…now that would be sweet
Although I do question how long before they close this loophole now that you’ve blogged about it Pat!
I had a similar experience with Virgin UK payg. I was only charged 30p per day for my data usage during my 2 weeks in Nigeria last month. This rate should have applied to only usage within the UK. I am in the US now and it still applies when I tested it.
Nice find Pat. Keep us updated on how long you get away with it! I’m sure that they’ll close the loophole eventually as joe said.
Speed of the connection seemed decent. How are meteor in general as a service provider?
use it as much as you can while it is free as they can not legally charge you for the service later as this would entail putting a negative balance on your account which is not allowed for any prepaid mobile accounts!
I wonder if this is because of the upgrades meteor were doing to their backend system. lots of people complaining on forums about being overcharged on their bills because of the upgrades, although meteor are looking after the errors.