Virgin Mobile: First Impressions

I've been using Virgin Mobile for a few days now, and here are my initial impressions.

I haven't used the phone much, but judging by the signal meter on my phone, the signal varies drastically throughout the day. With the phone in exactly the same place in the house, I'll sometimes have full signal strength, and sometimes minimal.

The GPRS is slow. It's been a while since I've used GPRS in SA, but this seems slower than I remember. It's particularly slow in connecting, and it seems to drop the connection a lot. And maybe it's my phone, but it's as if it drops the connection but doesn't disconnect - so next time I try to check my mail, it just can't find the gmail site. I then actually have to manually tell it to disconnect; then I can go ahead and load a page and it'll automatically reconnect (which, as I say, is very slow - so much for always-on internet, or the simulation thereof).

I also suspect - although I have done *no* investigation into this yet, so I could be totally wrong - that I'm being overbilled. I browsed El Reg, Boing Boing, and Bruce Schneier's blog, and checked my mail a couple of times, and have been billed about R1.50. At 50c per mb, that would imply I used 3mb, which seems a bit high for that amount of browsing. But I've (hopefully) set up the traffic monitor on the phone, so I can see what kind of usage that's recording and compare it to the billing.

I haven't quite managed to set my phone up as a modem yet - I seem to have packed my motorola cable in the boxes being shipped over, so I can't use the motorola; and the Vario seems to have a very different setup, so I haven't got that working yet.

I'm not impressed with their customer service - emails sent to 'sortmeout@virginmobile.com' seem to take at least 24 hours to be answered, and sometimes take more like 48 or 72 hours.

A few things that I've found out that may be useful:

• to change your pin, dial **004*Old pin*New pin*New pin# (although I get an 'invalid parameters' message when I try it)
• you need to activate your sim before you can use it; read the reverse of the sim holder
• they say they'll zero your balance if you don't recharge in 90 days; that's not quite true. All you have to do is use your account; making any calls, sending sms's and topping up all qualify
• the MMS settings are:
  Description: Virgin MMS
  Connects to: WAP Network
  Access point: vmms
  User name: blank
  Password: blank
• Name: Virgin MMS
  MMSC URL: http://mms.virginmobile.co.za
  WAP Gateway: 196.31.116.242
  Port: 8080
  Max Sending size: 100Kb