It has been just over a week since I received my Galaxy Tab from our friends at MobiCity and a week since I signed up to TPG Mobile (TPG’s mobile division, believe it or not ;)). I reached out to you guys on Twitter as to which Carrier I should go with where I could get a hefty data allowance but also be able to send text messages if need be, in an attempt to keep plan prices down. A lot of you replied with different suggestions, though none of them were for Vodafone or Three, surprise surprise.. Optus Dollar Days was right up, Virgin Mobile was also a top contender with its Mobile Broadband caps, but someone suggested TPG Mobile and seeing as though I already have an existing ADSL2+ connection with them I thought, ‘why not?’.
I signed up to TPG Mobile’s $29.99 Heavy Cap which gives me $1000 credit ($400 TPG-2-TPG, $600 TPG-2-Anyone) and a hefty 2GB of data for all my browsing needs, best of all there’s no long-term contract to sign, only month-to-month agreements. Two days after signing up, I received my SIM card in the snail-mail. This clever little SIM can also be popped out to create a Micro SIM for all your non-conformist Apple needs.
After carefully placing the delicate SIM inside of my Galaxy Tab I headed to the TPG website to activate my SIM, this was easy enough and I saw my Galaxy Tab connected to the network in under 60 minutes, I wasn’t really paying attention so it may have been quicker. Then came to glorious game of “Getting the Galaxy Tab to connect to Data”, I for one am not a fan of this game, and don’t recommend it to anyone, it’s mainly yourself yelling at technology to work and it just giving you the finger in return. After 2 hours of trying different APNs listed by you guys on the APNs Page I gave up.
So it turns out with TPG Mobile that you have to enable GPRS in your account before you can connect to any kind of data, a handy feature that they do not tell you about in the 3 pages of useless information sent with the SIM card. Now, to enable data, you login to your account and select “Enable GPRS”, that’s all well and good if TPG actually setup your account properly. It took them 8-9 hours before I could change any of the settings for my SIM on their website. Now that I had data connected, I could browse the web right? Wrong.
As some of you may know TPG use Optus’ ‘Open Network’ so there are quite a few APNs that can be entered to make data work, after playing around I got data to actually flow to my Galaxy Tab without too much of a problem. So after a day of mucking about, I did end up getting everything setup and in working order.
Conclusion
Although customer support may be non-existent and the service can be a mess to set up, I’m willing to stick with it due to it being affordable and the freedom to stop using it whenever I want without have to pay to cancel a one or two year contract. Speeds are comparable to those of Telstra’s NextG network, at least around my house which is where I use the Galaxy Tab 99% of the time, with ~2.5Mbit / ~1Mbit. So overall, I’m happy with what I’m paying for.
Please, what settings worked for you in the end? I’m doing the same things over and over that you did! Please save me …..
Hi there. good review. Do you have any details about the APN settings you’ve input? I’ve enabled my GPRS, called TPG 3times and got APNs from them but all seem not to work.
Thanks for the tip about enabling data with TPG. Saved hours of stress no doubt.
Thanks for the review. Just the thing I was looking for 🙂
Hope you have better luck with this product than TPG internet. I have persevered for over 3 years but when there is a problem there is NO back up service. Been without voip for over a month this time (not unusual) but they still keep charging for a service that is not working. We have mobile phones in the house with Telstra, Optus, Vodaphone and my TPG. TPG is the only one that has no reception in our home. Believe everything you hear about lack of service with this company!!!
I had the same issue with setting my Desire Z on TPG where like you, I didn’t realised that you have to activate the GPRS via the accounts section. Once that was done, I then had to go through the various APN settings that was posted on this forum and Whirlpool before it magically connected itself to the mobile network. I can’t fault the TPG customer support though. They are ok and have send me a couple of suggestions to try and resolve the issue. But if you get really stuck, go to the APN section on this website or… Read more »
Have you looked at Internode’s sim? It costs $10 and you 3GB data/month for $24.99 and you can have it on a monthly plan and it uses the Optus network, plus you get text messages
I forget to add that the APN for Internode is as easy as!
Name: Internode
APN: internode
And thats it!
I have been trying to setup data on my phone for the past few hours. The TPG FAQs section is about as useful as the pages they sent out with the SIM. Can you let me know what settings you used for your access point?
Must say that I have often told customers who visit my site that TPG is great but you better own a semi techo hat because you are likely to be left to work it out for yourself.
Glad to see that you got it to work in the end.
Thanks for sharing the experience. I’ll be walking down this road (albeit with an adam) very soon so well timed. CHeers!
Oh my gosh Buzz! Any regular Joe would have smashed the device against the wall after an hour! You may be interested to know that a friend from work has had endless trouble getting both Telstra and Optus pre paid sims to work in his iPad. There is no access to apn settings or anything similar on an iPad so he’s at the mercy of Apple getting it right so it “just works”. LMAO at Apple’s “just works” when I’m the guy friends come to when their iDevices don’t “just work”. This reminds me of the 6 hours I spent… Read more »
I’ve been using the $1 / month budget pay as you go sim. Free 150mb of data per month (50mb for non TPG broadband customers)and a measly 2.75c / mb as my mobile broadband.