Mobile operator 3 to offer free internet and SMS to pre-pay customers

3 is apparently planning on offering free internet and SMS to prepay customers who top up by a certain amount. The new offer, called ‘3Pay’, will being at the start of June, and will offer larger amounts of SMS depending on how much you top up by.

3 customers who top-up via a registered debit or credit card will automatically gain the freebies. Topping up by £5 gets you 25 texts, £10 gets 300,  £15 gets 500 texts,  £20 gets 1,000 texts and a £25 grants unlimited texts. So what about the mobile internet? Using prepay at all gives you an allowance 150MB of mobile data – which doesn’t scale up or down. Both of these freebies last for 90 days, at which point if you haven’t used it, you lose it.

Picked up from Mobile News

From the release:

3’s head of pay as you go Liz Richardson: “So often Pay prepay customers are overlooked and aren’t offered the same great value packages and perks as those who pay monthly. 3 Pay As You Go will give customers a range of freebies that will last for 90 days, three-times longer than the other networks. We want to change mobile forever and with a network designed and built for the Mobile Internet, we can offer our prepay customers free mobile internet and free internet calls with Skype, not just the standard text and talk bundles. All our prepay customers will get a 150MB mobile internet allowance. That’s enough to check Bebo or Facebook over 100 times, or send 1,600 twitters, every day for three months.”

What we think?

Getting completely unlimited SMS for a 25 quid top-up that you’d almost certainly be getting anyway is actually a pretty nice deal for pre-paid. Getting 150MB of data to use over a 90 day period? Not so good. It’s fascinating, but operators seem to slooowly sidling closer to the idea that mobile data is something they might need to let people have a bit cheaper. Most of the steps take the shape of tiny, begrudging offers like this, but we do seem to be getting better.