Three is to take another crack at battling Eir’s cut-price GoMo mobile service with a revamped budget offering from its ‘youth’ subsidiary brand, ‘48’.
wo new deals are priced at €10 and €15 per month, with 20GB or 40GB of data and 300 minutes of calls.
This is less than half the monthly data available on GoMo’s €13 (80GB) plan, which also has unlimited calling minutes.
However, Three is hoping that the lack of an initial sim fee (€10 with GoMo) will persuade some users to go with 48 instead.
5G is “also in the plans” for the 48 service, executives say, even though Three has not yet launched its 5G service in Ireland. GoMo has no plans for 5G, Eir says.
Other features include the ability to ‘share’ 1GB of data with friends on the same network, or to convert unused calling minutes to data at an exchange rate of 100 minutes per gigabyte. Users can also carry unused data forward to their next month.
Three also believes that a feature to allow ‘48’ users to donate data to charity may appeal to young users.
However, if you need more data than your monthly 20GB or 40GB limit allows, 48 charges €3 per gigabyte of data, making it one of the few new service plans to charge for excess data.
One advantage to 48’s offering is that you can order a sim card and try it out with 1GB of free data before you sign up to pay.
You can also receive calls on the number, although you cannot make calls. In this way, it is possible to can check whether the network signal is the right one for the user’s location.
“Since 2012, 48 is Ireland’s first digital-only youth mobile network and more recently we recognised the need to freshen up our membership plans to better suit our customer’s needs,” said Eilis Fitzgerald, marketing manager for 48.
“We listened to our target market and have created a mobile experience that is truly different, offering the flexibility that our customers crave.”
In October, Eir’s GoMo service raced to over 100,000 customers in three months after introducing a service with 80GB of data and unlimited calls and texts for €10 per month, later repriced to €13 per month for new users.