Goodbye BT, Hello BT & Lebara
With the huge rise in the cost of living and inflation going through the roof, we’re all looking to save those extra few pennies.
I’m an avid reader of www.latestdeals.co.uk/ on the web, over the past few years I’ve had some amazing bargains, some of which I can’t believe actually went through the checkout, these include 5 Ltrs of car leather cleaner for £0.99 inc delivery, a set of video / photo lights for £49.00 instead of £180 and many others too numerous to list!
I’m an avid reader of www.latestdeals.co.uk/ on the web, over the past few years I’ve had some amazing bargains, some of which I can’t believe actually went through the checkout, these include 5 Ltrs of car leather cleaner for £0.99 inc delivery, a set of video / photo lights for £49.00 instead of £180 and many others too numerous to list!
These days many people have ditched their home phone landline in preference for a mobile phone, I had a landline I used for business but, now I’m retired, I found it was only being used by a handful of people and I never used it for outgoing calls.
When my BT contract of 24 months came up for renewal recently, I looked at ways to reduce my outgoings, previously I’d paid my line rental in one lump sum to save a few pounds and my monthly charges for Broadband, landline and mobile were costing me £45 per month, in effect, my total BT outlay was costing me £67 per month.
I’d decided to drop BT totally, I found a good deal on Broadband from Plusnet (owned by BT!) for £25pm however it would go up to around £45 after 18 months and it required a new phone socket in the house (£45). For the mobile I spotted a deal on Latestdeals for Lebara on Vodaphone, it was 12Gb data, unlimited calls and texts for just 1p per month for 6 months then £6.90 a month after, on a one month rolling contract - that looked too good to miss!
BT have a dedicated team to talk to if you are thinking of leaving them, I called up and said I wanted to leave and explained my reasons, the lady listened and said there was no way they could match the mobile deal but she’d look at a Broadband only deal for me. After around 30 minutes chatting she offered me £10 per month Broadband only until my prepaid line rental ended in Feb 2023 then, £30 per month for Broadband only with no additional line rental charges - I accepted.
I ordered an additional Lebara SIM for my phone (I’d recently dropped my cellular iPad supplier for the Lebara deal), another SIM turned up next day for my iPhone. All went well, the SIM worked in my iPhone (better signal than BT!) and I arranged to port-over my number with Lebara.
3 days later the port-over went through, I called my number and it all worked however….iMessage texts were not coming through showing my mobile number, it showed all texts using iMessage as coming from my email address and, the iPhone assign number to iMessage failed to verify.
A long chat with Lebara tech online failed to fix the problem and I thought I was going to have to drop Lebara for another supplier. 2 things then happened, Lebara set me a link to get new network settings which I did and, my wife found a solution online to log into Apple, delete my number, then add my number again and restart the iPhone.
After an hour I tried it and wonder of wonders it all worked, the iPhone let me assign my original mobile number to my texts using iMessage, the world was back in balance and I’ve more than halved my monthly outgoings for Broadband and mobile phone.
