One thing to be aware of is that you need to manually set up your phone to work abroad on SMARTY. In the USA, for example, call rates are expensive but competitive but data’s around £100 per GB! You’ll pay per minute, text and MB data at these rates. There’s no inclusive worldwide roaming on SMARTY. It does what it says on the tin, just make sure you know what you’re getting before you buy. We never got a 4G connection abroad either, so 3G had to suffice for checking maps, online reviews and using social media.
#Smarty had a party review free
The only way to figure out the problem is by going online, which you won’t be able to do (without finding free WiFi or using someone else's phone). This can be a massive headache if you didn’t realise this before traveling. To get it to work you’ll need to follow these instructions. Unfortunately, our experience didn’t start off well as when we landed in the EU we realised SMARTY doesn’t turn on roaming by itself. Useful link: SMARTY's network feature FAQs You can get an eSIM with their parent company Three. Visual voicemail is not supported by SMARTY though ( see networks with visual voicemail here).ĮSIMs are not something SMARTY currently offer ( see networks that do offer eSIM here). You can set up your own custom message or turn it off entirely. Voicemail calls are free (included in your plan).
If you’ve never heard of it, it’s a nice feature that can direct your unanswered calls to a different UK phone number.
#Smarty had a party review how to
Their handy guide here shows you how to get it set up. There’s no tethering fair usage policy in the UK.Ĭall forwarding works on SMARTY. You can use your SMARTY SIM card for tethering (creating a personal WiFi hotspot using your phone and its mobile data connection to connect other devices). Even though Three have WiFi on the Underground, you don’t get that or any other free access via SMARTY. So what else can SMARTY’s mobile network do and not do? You won’t get any free WiFi hotspots. Useful link: SMARTY's promise not to slow you down But remember, speeds fluctuate locally on any network. You can easily watch videos in HD without buffering. Not bad for a low-cost network.Ģ5 Mbps is like a decent fibre-to-the-cabinet home broadband.
That puts SMARTY in the top half of networks for data speeds: behind EE-based providers but ahead of both O2 and Vodafone and the virtual operators that use them. More often though, it hung around 4 Mbps. SMARTY also provide decently fast 3G, sometimes reaching 12 Mbps, which rivals the typical speed of 4G. We even got a signal of 40 Mbps over rural 4G where fewer people use it. Our lowest result of 9 Mbps was in a suburban area. Though results fluctuated now and then this is normal even when testing two SIMs of the same provider, so any tiny differences can be ignored. We didn’t find any built-in differences between the two. But we did some spot checks in rural and urban areas to compare SMARTY with Three directly. It would be an impossible task to test speeds in every inch of the country. Useful link: Check SMARTY coverage near you now But if it’s fine in the places you mostly use your phone, how important is the rest of the country? Check and see. Generally then, we can’t say SMARTY have excellent coverage and there aren’t better networks. But from our own experience, we’ve found their 3G often better performing than other networks’ worst 4G. In less populated places, you will end up on 3G more often than any other network with SMARTY. This aims to convert more 3G masts into 4G ones. SMARTY benefit from Three’s aggressive network expansion programme. But because they don’t have older pre-3G technologies to fall back on, you do get more rural blackspots than average.ĤG data coverage is an improving picture ( see 5G below). They’re also totally honest with the location of blackspots which is good considering there are a fair few.įor calls and texts, SMARTY’s signal generally goes toe-to-toe with every other network. Our real life findings matched up well with the checker’s claims.
Signal strength fluctuated here and there but this is to be expected. We had 4G and 3G on both in the same areas. We took two identical test phones out, one with a Three SIM and the other with a SMARTY SIM.Īt no point did we find major differences. Our tests were admittedly limited to our local area, however we could still spot check a couple of things: one, how accurate is the coverage checker? And two, is the signal as strong as Three’s?