Talk:Euro4/@comment-26019694-20150520020200

I also have a long term usage report on the Ortel Cross plan. I returned a week ago from a four week stay in Italy, Germany, Austria and a few hours in France. I ended up buying two Ortel SIM cards from an eBay seller in Germany, one for me and one for my wife. Each card came with a €7.50 credit and I added another €15 to get me over 20 so I could order the Cross plan. Because we would be in Europe for 4 weeks, my plan was to purchase the Cross plan the day I left so that the 30 days would cover my trip. Unfortunately, https://mein.ortelmobile.de was unavailable on the day we were leaving. So when we arrived in London to change planes, I texted CROSS to 77300 to activate the plan. I received a text acknowledging the purchase and saying another text would come when the plan was activated. My wife got her followup text before we left Heathrow, while mine didn't come until we got to Rome. Once they came, I enabled data roaming and everything worked.

In Italy we roamed mostly on 3G with occasional Edge using the Wind and TIM networks. In Germany we saw 4G (LTE), Edge and occasional GPRS coverage. I did run one speed test while on LTE in Munich and saw about 7 Mbps down. In general data coverage was good and worked pretty well. One exception was in the Rhine valley (Bacharach to Sankt Goar) where the phone alternated between Edge and 4G coverage, and when on Edge I often had no usable internet (pages didn't load, no navigation).

We did very little calling. Local calling seemed to work well, but international calling back to the US less so. Calls often didn't complete or gave a message in German that seemed to be something about not being able to complete the call as dialed. I expermiented with different ways of dialing, but never was able to solve it. I did complete some calls, so I don't really know what the problem was.

As Borislip mentiones below, the real problem with Ortel is their processing of plan activations and refills. I mentioned the issue with mein.ortelmobile.com and the delay with activations above, but the problem is greater when attempting to top-up with an additional 500 mb. There is no way to top-up before your existing package runs out. You get a text when the package runs out, but once it does you immediately start using any existing credits at 24 cents/megabyte. Both adding credit to your account and activating additional data take random amounts of time.

So the process works like this. When you receive the text saying you're out of data you must immediately disable data or you'll use up any remaining credit. Then, if you don't have sufficient credit for a refill, you must purchase one and wait for anywhere from minutes to hours for it to take effect before you can order the refill. Then you must wait again for minutes to hours for the new refill to take effect before renabling data. If you renable data before your account has been debited for your purchase, I assume you can end up with too little available to make the purchase. (Purchasing, debiting your account and actually applying the package are discrete events. You choose the package on the website, they debit your account sometime later, then activate the package still later.)

Overall, this was frustrating and difficult to manage, particularly while out and doing things tourists do. Unless they fix this, I'd recommend that people who will need to refill to take this hassle into account whe deciding what to do.

On the plus side, being able to roam through five different countries was a plus--much easier than buying separate SIMs for each country. We used our initial Cross purchase for the entire four weeks without any problem with early expiration. Ortel's data usage reported on the website ran higher than what our phones reported by 10% or so. Hope this helps!