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Comment by megablast | Hacker News Reader

Who is that with? I was in Vietnam earlier this year, and had real trouble getting the road sellers to understand that I wanted some data. Can you give me a clue what to get next time.

I am £15 prepaid with 3 here in the UK, i get 2,000 texts, 600 minutes and UNLIMITED data. I think this is the best deal I have ever heard of.

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I'm currently using Viettel. At least in their main shop here in Nha Trang the staff spoke good enough English that they were able to understand what I wanted. Just tell them you want the 3g plan with the monthly fee.

You may have to go into an actual shop to get this set up. The people selling sims on the side of the road aren't very tech savvy in my experience.

When I was in Vietnam I just bought whatever SIM off someone on the road and then went back to my hotel room and googled up the activation instructions. Usually you just text the name of the plan you want to a special shortcode (same as most UK prepaid)

So all the sims on the street come with data?

If it's like the Philippines, all the SIM does is get you on the network, but with only a SIM card you can't call, text, or anything. Then you purchase a prepaid card from a convenience store or anywhere with call minutes, text messages, and/or data -- the card has a long code that you plug in to the phone to activate it and associate the minutes etc with your SIM.

Same here in Uruguay, for prepaid phone use, you just buy a SIM (2 dollars), then you have to either buy a prepaid card or go to a store where you can "fill" your SIM.

Then you can text the name the plan you want, I pay 5 dollars for one month's worth of data (384 megabytes). You can also get one gigabyte for U$S 5, but expires after 5 days.

http://www.antel.com.uy/antel/personas-y-hogares/internet/pl...

there's also a fixed contract 3 gb data plan for U$ 15.

Do you use all those 600 mins? For £10, giffgaff gives you unlimited data, unlimited text, but only 200 mins. But I don't even bother with their goodybags. Think I spend about between £5-7 a month on just prepay.

Vietnam I found pretty awesome. I got a sim for my phone, tons of data (which I couldn't use up) and plenty of calls for about £5 (150k VND) which lasted the whole month I was there. And the data speeds seemed pretty good (although I was only on 2G). Think I was with Tomato plan on Viettel?

That sounds very similar to my plan on Tesco mobile although my data is limited to 1.5GBs. What is your experience of 3? I've heard bad things about them and worry about the quality of their coverage. Would you recommend them? And if you don't mind me asking: where in the UK are you located?

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