A new mobile player in town

In Italy, there are a number of mobile services, the most popular ones are namely Tre, Tim and Vodafone which has been dominant for a long time.

I’ve been on Tre since the first time that I’ve migrated in Rome (around 9 years already!) But they are increasingly expensive considering that when I first started, it was 5 euro. Now, the last plan that I had with them was 11 euro a month for 8 GB of data and an additional 1 euro to have the LTE option.

However in Italy, there are new players in the market – namely Ho Mobile and Iliad. At this point of writing,  you can get at least 40 GB a month with unlimited calls and texts for about 8 euro.

So Cart decided to hop on Iliad while I got a Ho Mobile sim card. It was pretty easy to do – all I needed to do was to sign up and insert the documentation and then go to any of their list of partners (almost always there is one in a newspaper kiosk next to the metro) to pay and collect the sim card.

Porting my number to Ho Mobile was straightforward too – I followed the instructions on the app, and in about two days, I was able to use my number as before.

Woah, this is the first time that I ever get to play with so much data. I’ve been extremely frivolous at playing Ingress while playing Spotify at the same time  (both of which consumes a lot of data) and I still have

I get 40 GB of data and unlimited calls and unlimited texts. It’s been really challenging to try to finish the 40 GB. And so far, I’ve been extremely frivolous – playing ingress while listening to spotify at the same time (both of which consumes a lot of data) and I still have more than 30 GB of data left over to use in 15 days.

So far Ho Mobile has been good. With the amount of data that I have, sometimes I think it’s even possible to get rid of the home wifi altogether. And because Ho Mobile uses the Vodafone network (which is supposed to be the fastest in Italy) upload and download speed is decent.

The only small qualm that I have is that in some areas, especially in crowded places, Ho Mobile is significantly slow. When playing ingress in the centre for example, it takes a frustratingly long time for me to deploy because of the lag.

Also, I’m not really liking the limited amount of data that I get when travelling to other European countries – I can only use up 2.5 GB (while Cart can use 3 GB on his Iliad) which is fine for a couple of days but will be an issue if I want to stay outside of Italy for a week or more.

But apart from that, Ho Mobile has been decent and recently has been increasing their plan for an additional 10 GB … not sure if it’s really such a sweet deal since 40 GB already so challenging to consume! Lets see how it goes.