www.togglemobile.co.uk part of Lyca Mobile.

Yes I noticed Toggle Mobile and considered switching to them after my disagreement with Ovivo before realising their UK charges were too expensive.

Vaguely looks worth having one for short notice trips abroad but the usual problem is managing to keep these occasionally used SIMs active.

Also as a Lyca Mobile customer for a while (the parent company of Toggle) I must point out that they also have a nasty habit of using bait and switch pricing to lure new customers in to their stable.

What are their minimum activity requirements while back home in the UK?

Indeed on that last point I gave up trying to keep a couple of MVNO SIMs going in Spain (that generally had three month inactivity timeouts) and switched to Orange Spain (part of France Telecom and nothing to do with EE) when they came out with the SIM Mundo tariff because of their excellent requirement that the SIM remains valid as long as it is topped up once every 13 months.

Dave wrote on Feb 19^th, 2014 at 8:19pm:


Obviously they have the right to change the period but my understanding is its been 13 months ever since the network was originally set up as the third Spanish mobile network in the form of Amena (using the 1800mhz rather than 900mhz GSM mobile frequency range already in use by Movistar and Airtel) more than 10 years ago.

Once a practice like this becomes entrenched and you have a whole base of users who are with you specifically because they depend on the period of validity it becomes a lot harder to change it.  I am sure that Orange Spain are perfectly well aware that they have by now captured the lion's share of the regular foreign visitor market through this practice, especially as the Orange brand Europe wide has also always had a longstanding practice of offering cheaper international calls to fixed line phones in other EU countries than its main competitors.  As long as these customers are reasonably high spending when they are in Spain there shouldn't be an issue.

Where a network's customer base has always mainly been domestically focused (as most of the Spanish MVNOs like Pepephone and Carrefour tend to be ) there tends to be an assumption that a SIM can be considered dead if not used for three months as few domestic users ever leave their SIMs inactive for more than this amount of time.

The bottom line is that inactive SIMs clearly don't cost very much and the main reason on setting an inactivity timeout is to stop too much drain on the pool of nine digit mobile numbers.   Way more SIM cards than are currently in use will have been produced over time by any European mobile network and so it is important there is some way to identify those SIMs that have been binned for good by their owners so the numbers can be recycled.

My personal opinion is that Orange, Spain have actually got the validity period right and I doubt that it will be reviewed or change unless Orange, Spain ever combines completely with one of the other three Spanish network providers (Movistar, Vodafone and Yoigo).  If a 13 month validity period was not economically sustainable it would surely have changed by now.