I'm thinking about killing my UK operator accounts

For quite a while now I’ve been wondering what to do about my mobile accounts.

This is roughly how my UK operator account structure looks:

Vodafone
– 6 lines, including my primary mobile phone number
– Includes: The car phone SIM, 2 BlackBerries, iPad 2
– Approx £150-200 per month

Orange
– 1x iPhone 4, £35/month

o2
– 1x iPhone 3, £35/month
– Yeah, I REALLY need to do something about that. The SIM is sitting in some old Windows Phone at the moment.
– 1x BlackBerry connection, £15/month. I haven’t used this for about 4 years, if memory serves.

Three
– 1x iPhone 4S, £35/month
– 1x MiFi deal, £10/month

All told that’s about £315ish a month. It’s often at £500 because I’m usually roaming and doing stupid things with Vodafone.

But that’s a committed spend of around £300 a month.

It’s a price I pay for you, dear reader.

The underlying concept being that if you want to try stuff, it’s good to have proper contract-level SIMs you can play with.

Back in the day, when operators actually did stuff that was “new” on a regular basis, it was thoroughly useful to have accounts with them. Further, it was better to have — as I say — contract accounts, rather than SIM-only or pay-as-you-go. Some services, especially test ones, didn’t play nicely with PAYG.

Fast forward to today and I can’t avoid thinking this spend is totally pointless.

WHY do I have an O2 account — TWO O2 accounts — when I never bother using it? It’s just-in-case.

Just in case of what?

I suppose in the case of O2, that’s an exception. Telefonica is doing innovative stuff. I was able to use my O2 SIM to test with BlueVia, for example.

But it would have worked with a tenner-a-month SIM.

Or even a PAYG.

I think it’s time to cull my operator accounts.

I shall begin tomorrow.

My Orange one has a few more months to go before I can kill it. I might do what I did with Three and simply phone up and pay the money to terminate there and then, then flog-the-phone to cover the cost.

I’m ok with Three. Both accounts are working ok for me at the moment.

O2: Well the BlackBerry account can go immediately. I haven’t used that for donkey’s years. And as for the £35/month one… I was going to use that for an iPad lease. Turns out they’re not doing that. I was considering buying the iPhone 4S on lease through that account too. I don’t know. I think I might kill the BlackBerry and move the contract to a pay-monthly tenner-a-month deal.

The sad reality here is that I don’t even know if I’ll use that. Perhaps I should just end both.

Vodafone: Well, I’ve been paying well over the odds with them for quite a long time. I think 3 or 4 of the lines are completely out of commitment. There’s no need for me to have a car phone SIM on £30-something per month. We hardly ever use it. Likewise with the 3G dongle from Vodafone — I never use that either.

Yeah. Lots to clean up.

(I just looked at my Vodafone account. I’ve 7 lines. 5 are out of commitment! Deary me. And for the sake of accuracy, my last bill with Vodafone was a highly reasonable £271 including VAT. Not bad considering there are 7 lines.)

It’s a sad day when I can’t really see any value in keeping particular operator accounts 😐