Hi there,
I go to Portugal quite regularly and have been using a vodafone dongle to create a hotspot in our villa which everyone can use. The dongle and Sim were purchased in Portugal from vodafone and I had a tariff where I paid 10Euros for 10hours connection time. This was used in 5 minute blocks. So I would turn on the dongle and we would all connect laptops and mobile phones via wi-fi, download everything we wanted, surf a bit, and then turn the dongle off. It was cheap and easy to keep track of how much you were using – you could check live on the website. Then I forgot to top up over the winter and my sim card was cancelled and vodafone no longer sell sim cards with that tariff.
I had to buy a sim for 12.5 euros which provides 1GB of data for 30 days. I thought this was OK because when I use my UK phone at home, even with my laptop running through it as a mobile hotspot on 4G, I use less than 1GB per month. However, in Portugal, just turning on my laptop and connecting via the Portuguese vodafone dongle seemed to use 250MB in just a couple of minutes (about a quarter of what I had purchased). The same happened the next day and so on. 1GB lasted 4 days of about 15-20mins each day using email and internet – NO music or movies. When I came home I used my UK mobile as the hotspot and, as before, it uses very little – despite doing much more emailing due to work etc.
My questions are:
- Is there some reason why I seem to use up the allowance so quickly in Portugal (it IS a Portuguese Vodafone sim remember) ?
- Is there any way to get a “TIME” tariff like the one I had before?
- Is there an alternative which may be cheaper/easier….either to purchase in UK or Portugal
I’d really appreciate help with this.
Thanks
DJWA
