Mobile Network Comparison

There’s another new kid on the MVNO block: White Mobile. With an aggressive pricing model and some catchy marketing, they are aiming to be the next big cut-price mobile network. And they aren’t holding anything back when going for the throats of their competitors. They are looking to the future with heavy investment into VoIP services and they are also keeping prices at rock bottom. With landline calls starting at just 3p per minute, mobile calls at just 6p per minute and texts priced as low as 5p each, it looks like they might be making some fairly substantial waves in the PAYG market soon.

Not only that, but they also have some other great offering such as free voicemail, free calls and texts to other White Mobile users and even cheap international calls.

Looks like they are offering a pretty well-rounded package. But are they the real deal and can they keep these prices so low forever? We got together with co-founder Graeme Hutchinson to find out more. He’s worked for the UK’s biggest virtual network Virgin Mobile along with ex-CEO of EE Tom Alexander, so it would be fair to say he’s got quite a pedigree in the mobile industry.

Hi Graeme, thanks for taking the time to talk with us today, to start with, please can you let us know a bit about how the company came about?

White Mobile is the collaboration between a number of very successful and highly experienced executives from the mobile phone and international calling card industry, led by Graeme Hutchinson, former Virgin Mobile Sales and Marketing Chief and co-founder.

When did the company launch? What have you been doing so far and how do you think it’s been going?

White Mobile launched in November 2012 and has been selling SIMs and top up services through several thousand retail outlets and via its website. To date sales and have been exceptionally strong which we believe is a direct result of our brilliant rates to both UK and international destinations, combined with a genuinely customer centric philosophy that we hope comes through in everything we do as an organisation.

What is your target market? How has adoption been so far and do you have growth forecasts?

Ultimately our target market is anyone in the UK who prefers straightforward pay as you go mobile services (as opposed to 30 day and longer contracts). In recent years the cost of pay as you go services have increased dramatically as operators try to force customers to take out contracts. White Mobile reverses this trend and has brought back brilliant value to pay as you go. Why should consumers get worse calling rates because they want to pay as they go? The answer is they shouldn’t and mobile operators are charging excessively for pay as you go. White Mobile is the UK’s pay as you go champion and offers the best value to UK consumers, whether for UK calls and texts or for international calls and text. Take up so far has been fantastic and our forecasts is for hundreds of thousands of White Mobile UK customers within the next three years.

Which network do you use to provide your infrastructure and why did you choose them?

EE. In our opinion the best network in the UK with the most ambitious and advanced network plans.

Why do you think so many people are stuck on expensive PAYG plans when there are so many cheap alternatives available now? What’s the main thing holding people back from switching?

Ultimately people have different reasons and motivations for wanting to pay as you go rather than be forced to commit to a contract. We recognise and respect that consumers should be free to make whatever choice they want regarding how they pay for their mobile service and should not be unduly punished with expensive call rates for pay as you go (which is what we now see from most UK operators). White Mobile changes all this so that consumers can pay and you go AND have exceptionally low rates.

You offer much cheaper international rates than most other companies – is your focus mainly on calling abroad or UK usage?

Both – White Mobile rates are extremely competitive for both UK and international services.

Some of our readers have expressed concern that your prices are too low to be maintainable. What can you say to reassure people you don’t intend to bait and switch after you’ve attracted a customer base?

Our business has been designed from the outset to be profitable from the pay as you go market and the typically lower spending mobile consumer. Our rates provide a decent profit margin even though they are the best available and we are committed to maintaining our competitive position in the UK market. We have no cynical plans to hike rates at a later date – that is simply not in our DNA. With our customer centric approach, driven by Graeme Hutchinson whose leadership helped Virgin Mobile to grow from zero to 5m customers in 5 years, we know we will not disappoint mobile consumers who switch to White Mobile.

What do you think the impact of 4G and the exponential rise of smartphones is going to be on data pricing?

Our data rates are the best available on pay as you go at just 2.5p per megabyte and we also offer data bundles that provide even better value for customers with higher data requirements. We are hugely excited about 4G and the rise of data services and expect to see more services being enabled via data and smartphone and tablet devices. These so called “over the top” services will become the norm and within our family of businesses we are already embarked on this journey with our FooCall and FooTalk smartphone apps.

Finally, where do you see the network in five years?

A profitable multi-national MVNO converged with IP services serving millions of customers with world class products and customer care.

Convincing or just marketing guff? What do you think? We’ve had a White Mobile SIM card for some time now so we’ll have a conclusive White Mobile review in the coming days when all our tests are fully completed. But for the time being, have you tried White Mobile or are you just tempted? Do you think they can keep prices this low? And have they done enough to convince you to switch for good?

No idea what they are saying in this video but it seems that they are stress-testing what is billed as the world’s toughest mobile phone – the Sonim XP1. It’s a fully rugged phone designed to be water proof and usable in the harshest conditions. Whatever it is, after going through a cycle in the cement mixer, it miraculously still works! What’s the worst thing that your phone has survived?

The BBC’s fantastic iPlayer is getting more and more mobile use. When it was first introduced over five years ago, it was only ever intended for viewing on computers at home – even HD TV was far from a reality for the average user. However, nowadays its common to see someone watching the latest TV show or film using their mobile while on the bus. With the recent furore about the mobile data limits imposed by EE on their new 4G network, we thought we’d look into how far your bandwidth allowance will go when watching TV on BBC iPlayer.

There are lots of varying answers online as to how much of your mobile data allowance iPlayer will use up. A big problem with many of them is they are guesses or outdated. iPlayer has recently rolled out higher-quality streams that will use up more bandwidth. Another issue is that it’s quite hard to measure exactly how much data is actually being transferred by iPlayer as many users don’t;’ know how to isolate it and measure just that rather than all the other downloads and uploads going on with torrents, email, push notifications, HTTP requests and other protocols all running in the background.

We ran some simple tests on five different iPlayer programmes to see how much bandwidth it uses. We measured the total amount of data and came up with an average amount for an hour long programme.

The answer

On average, watching TV on iPlayer will use about 632MB/hour. It could be as low as 600MB/hour but it could also be much higher so, to be safe you should budget about 600-700MB for every hour that you are streaming.

How long will my allowance last?

With data allowances on most mobile phones being between 500MB and 1GB the simple table below will make it clear how much TV you can afford to watch each month before going over your limit. Don’t forget that the amounts below are if you only watch TV. If you use you mobile internet to download games or even check email and update Twitter, the amounts will be less (in some cases significantly so).

Many more details

The way that iPlayer works is incredibly complicated. There are a variety of audio and video codecs, you than access it on a huge array of platforms and there are simply hundreds of variables to consider. On top of this, calculating how big a certain piece of video will be when encoded and compressed on a computer is already an inexact science. If you just want to know roughly how much mobile data you’ll use watching TV on iPlayer, the figure above will do. But if you’re more interested, we’ll delve into the details a bit more.

Our calculations

To work out how much bandwidth it really uses, we took a sample of five different programmes that were recently broadcast on BBC channels. We tried to get a variety of different shows as the particular characteristics of each TV show will result in slightly different file sizes. We then shut down all web services apart from iPlayer and used a bandwidth monitoring programme to see how much data each programme took. We repeated the results later using the HD version of the streams.

Having done all this, we collated the results and, using the broadcast length of each show, calculated a bandwidth rate for each in MB per hour. So now the table below displays how much bandwidth each show will take per hour of streaming as well as the average.

As you can see, watching the standard stream you’re looking at about 632MB/hour for streaming over iPlayer. This is quite high so definitely keep an eye out if you have any monthly bandwidth limit and especially if you tether your phone to stream TV using a PC or laptop.

The HD-quality stream may look fantastic but they use almost twice as much data. Our results showed that view HD material on BBC iPlayer uses about 1101MB/hour or almost 1.1GB/hour. With a 5GB limit you’ll run out of data just watching ten minutes of TV a day.

Other considerations

The original iPlayer app used a peer-to-peer protocol to distribute video. This meant that in addition to downloading the programme you were watching, you would also upload large amounts of data making the bandwidth required even larger. Sometimes uploads even continued after you stopped watching. However, this is no longer an issue. It is worth considering that iPlayer has recently upgraded to a higher quality data stream which means that the bandwidth required is greater and that old estimates are probably out of date.

Don’t forget that iPlayer also uses completely different audio and video codecs depending on the receiver you are using. They have various efficiencies and bandwidths too. The resolution also changes resulting in vastly different data usage amounts. So, for example the iPhone H.264 feeds from the BBC are higher quality than in the Flash-based in-browser iPlayer.

The stream quality and bandwidth required also depends on the network you use. So using a Nokia N95 to watch iPlayer over 3G will use less bandwidth than using Wifi while watching iPlayer through a Wii or iPhone will result in a limit on the resolution of the stream. The best way to watch it is with a PC (whether using wifi or tethered to your mobile phone) where you can choose the resolution, you get high-quality H.264 encoding and you can get resolutions up to 720p. This does mean that you need a lot more bandwidth though with data requirements coming in at up to about 1400MB/hour.

Conclusion

iPlayer uses a lot of bandwidth, especially if you want to view the lovely HD quality streams. We can predict roughly how much data it will take up but be sure to use an app to track your mobile internet usage if you want to be sure. And be aware of how much you’re using so if you don’t have unlimited data and need to keep within network limits, you don’t get hit by massive fees.