Movistar

[Beachcomber]

Movistar must have a death wish. They are increasing the monthly cost of the basic Fusion package to €48 whilst the rest of the operators are competing for the business with lower prices.

[john the baptist]

Have they informed the customers?? I signed up for €42 euros for 18 months are they allowed to make such increases?

[john the baptist]

Ive just looked at my bill.

I dont want the TV channels? so dont want to pay the increased amount. How do we get them anyway??? I have no idea.

[Beachcomber]

There was an annex to the last bill. It takes effect from 5th May. You can cancel your contract any time before that without paying a penalty. The new price is actually €47 not €48 but I also subscribe to called ID which is €1 extra (up from 60 centímos).

There are some discussions about this on the Movistar forum of which this is one:

http://comunidad.movistar.es/t5/Dudas-M ... 195#M26082

On the face of it Orange and Vodafone offer similar Fusion-like options including a second mobile line at far cheaper prices but if you read the small print these are only introductory offers for a few months then they rise almost to the new Movistar level. The words 'short' and 'curlies' come to mind.

Vodafone have also increased my mobile tariffs by around 50% and they wanted to charge me €18 to change each one to another tariff. Despite being a Vodafone shareholder I have changed my three mobile lines over to Simyo.

Vodafone kept on phoning me offering to waive the changeover fee and special offer plans but none of them could match Simyo and I told them they were too late and they should have offered me this when I first called before I had started looking around for an alternative.

[john the baptist]

what is the tv they mention?? what are the channels and how do we get them???

is there any way of not opting for the increased price but staying with telefonica???

[Beachcomber]

I have never bothered with the TV. I have told them I don't want it but they say it is part of the Fusion package.

I don't think there is any way of opting out of the price increase. You could go to another provider but that would be jumping out of the frying pan into the fire. As I said, the headline prices of the other providers are time limited and go up after the first six months or a year.

[markwilding]

People I know who have taken it up tell me they receive canal plus football as part of the package for a year. If the English premier league is included, that would make it good value for those who like football.
My provider has something similar and TV is part of the deal but when I signed up if you took a second mobile phone line, they let you off the TV part. Yesterday I checked prices and that had disappeared and TV was compulsory on all deals.

However, today I've looked again and 30mb plus mobile can be had for as little as 38 Euros plus vat.

Since my contract ended I phone them from time to time to see if there are better deals for me
If you don't have a permanent contract, it might be worth keeping an eye on their webpage to see what offers are available to change.

[zanuck]

I've never figured out how to access the TV part of my Fusion contract and probably don't really want it anyway - maybe a bit like in the UK with BT as my Internet provider, I have BT TV (can't remember it's proper name, which is probably an indication that I haven't used it for years). Although BT did give me as part of my contract a "Vision Box" to connect to my router. There has never been any such offer as far as I know from when I contracted with Movistar last summer.

I saw in the annexo to my bill the other day that the Fusion price will increase to €47 and I think there was mention of more(?) football which I find about as thrilling as watching paint dry.

It is odd to a domiciled Brit, how some(?) Spanish companies seem to operate in the reverse way to British (ok, maybe not British owned before someone pounces) and increase (per Beachcomber) rather than decrease prices to attract business.

[USINSPAIN]

I was interested in Fusion for the free calls to Madrid when I use localphone to UK, what does the company discussed here Simyo charge to call Madrid is it included in say the 100 minutes rate

[Beachcomber]

Simyo charges €3,50 for 100 minutes per month to landlines and mobiles within Spain (not including 901,902 etc.) Localphone numbers start with 91 (Madrid) so are included in the 100 minutes.

Other minutes inclusive tarrifs are €2,00 for 30 minutes and €9,50 for 300 minutes.

If you exceed the limit you are charged €0,06 per minute plus €0,1815 to establish the call.

There is also a tariff where you pay no monthly quota whatsoever and just get charged for each call at the above rates.

If you sign up with Simyo and you give the telephone number of someone who is already contracted with them you both get a credit of €10.

[Miro]

Surely the increased price only applies to new customers? If you have an 18 month contract at €42, doesn't the price stay the same for the duration?
I am still awaiting a response to my complaint (see other thread) about being duped into another 12 months "permanencia" in return for nothing that I wanted - I got TV and an extra GB of mobile data added to my contract (to 2GB) but was only really interested in the increase from 10 to 20 mbps I was promised. But the engineer who (didn't) install the TV told me that was impossible. He suggested I change to the "€40 something" deal since I don't need more than 500 minutes of calls, and have only ever once gone over 500MB of mobile data in a month, and he was very surprised when I told him that Movistar had informed me I could not change to a "lesser" contract. (I'm currently on the €60 something package)