M-Budget Mobile User Reviews

Do you use M-Budget Mobile or have you used this Swiss mobile service provider? What was your experience with M-Budget Mobile?

I’m trying to find out what roaming charges would apply in the following situation:

My wife and I spend a lot of time in Germany and call each other within Germany on our mobile phones (I’m in Cologne, she’s in Bremen) with M-Budget plans.

I’m considering getting the M-Budget MEGA with europePlus plan, and my wife would also get the MEGA plan with europePlus thanks to familyPlus.

If we do that, will our mobile roaming in Germany, Austria, France, Italy, Spain and Portugal be fully covered?

Thanks for your answers

If you get those plans, there will be no additional costs for calling each other in Germany or the other countries you mentioned.

As long as both you and your wife are within Switzerland or EU countries, you will not pay anything extra to call each other. The call roaming costs are all covered by the flat fees.

Just be wary of data roaming (mobile Internet), because those plans only include 5 GB per month. If you use more than that, you pay for the additional data.

I was in Germany yesterday and was surprised that this time I could not connect to the Internet by data roaming with my M-Budget plan (29 francs per month). The Internet connection was sorely missed.

According to the info I got when I called M-Budget today, since March they expect customers to buy roaming credits in advance, but these are only valid for 30 days.

Supposedly this was what customers wanted (haha). The hotline employee even recommended I change service providers.

I travel abroad spontaneously and live near the Austrian border, so having to buy roaming credits every time I hop the border isn’t really practical.

I also don’t really know ahead of time how much data I’ll need.

Could you recommend any viable alternatives?

I think that not having data roaming enabled without choosing to add a data roaming bundle ahead of time is a good thing. Many customers aren’t aware of how expensive data roaming really is.

There have been cases of people being charged 300 or even 500 francs for 1 minute of Whatsapp messaging. This happens pretty regularly, and you can find plenty of examples on the Internet in which phone users were charged hundreds of francs for short stints of data roaming.

As far as I know, M-Budget lets you use data roaming after crossing the border so you can go online and buy a data roaming bundle. Did that not work?

I don’t know exactly which plan you have (the old Mobile One or one of the new Mini/Maxi/Mega plans). As far as I know, M-Budget doesn’t use different roaming rates for different plans.

The current M-Budget plans charge 3.90 francs per 100 megabytes of roaming data. That’s cheaper than the roaming bundles they sold before, which cost 5 francs for a 10-megabyte bundle.

The fact that roaming bundles expire after 30 days is not nice. As far as changing mobile services, you would have to do some sifting to find Swiss mobile plans which don’t have 30-day expiry periods for data roaming bundles. Coop Mobile is the only one I know of. The Mucho Mobile prepaid service is also an option, with data roaming bundles expiring after 180 days.

If you do a lot of traveling within Europe and don’t want to buy data bundles each time you leave Switzerland, you could look into adding the M-Budget europePLUS option to your plan. For 10 francs per month, this option extends your M-budget plan to cover roaming as well. Depending on how much data you use, this might be the solution for you. You get unlimited call roaming within EU countries and Switzerland and you can use your plan’s included mobile data for data roaming as well.

The unlimited plans now being offered by Sunrise and Swisscom are another alternative. But these are a lot more expensive than the M-Budget plan you are using.

You can also look at Coop. Coop Mobile also makes you buy data roaming bundles, but the bundles don’t expire so they are practical for spontaneous trips across the border. But Coop’s data roaming bundles are also more expensive.

As far as choosing the right amount of data, if you only leave the country for short trips, just buy a small 100-megabyte bundle. If that gets used up to quickly, buy a bigger bundle the next time. You should also check your phone settings and disable access to the Internet when your phone is using data roaming for any apps you don’t need while traveling.

There are phone services which automatically switch to data roaming when you cross the border without you buying a bundle first. I wouldn’t recommend them. If you absolutely had to have this service, then I recommend Salt. Salt doesn’t make you buy data roaming bundles, but you pay 2.95 francs per megabyte of roaming data in Europe.

M-Budget offers a 100-megabyte bundle for 3.90 francs, so for 1 franc more you get 100 times the data. 3.90 is also a good starting price for the smallest bundle. You’ll hardly find a better deal than that for data roaming bundles.