oneXOX Sim card: Choose your Welcome Deal wisely!!

 

While surfing through Shopee, I actually find the oneXOX prepaid SIM one of the cheapest (other than ICC, which I had very bad experience with) options for Malaysia SIM card! not to mention that the sellers are very responsive and very helpful if you ever face any problem when registering your card.

OneXOX prepaid comes with a few attractive Welcome Deals and a long validity of 28 months! You can also get plans which have data in the Season Pass (SP) which will not expire as long as you card stays activated (28 months)! Data not in the SP will expires after 30 days or the validity of the plan you get!

I thought since that I am just visiting for about 2 weeks (to a few parts of Malaysia) and I can easily top up via the app anywhere, I figured that I might not want to have data in my SP yet. 

So I got the SP FAT20 plan which cost SG$13 with 20GB of data that will be valid for 30 days. Well, that proved to be a bad choice! The SIM card will continue to be valid for 28 months, meaning after my Welcome Deal expires, I have a SIM card with no plan!

I decide to check the plans out on the XOX Black app, registered an account and checked out the data plans/add-ons available.

All I can say it's not very attractive! I feel 1GB is probably too little but 5GB is too much and too expensive. I wish there is something in between! The ESP Data Add-on appeals more to me price wise but the data expiring at 11:59pm no matter what time you buy the add-on is quite a deal breaker. 

I looked around for other plans/packages but there seems to be none (except for SP add-ons). So I head over to their website to look at their plans for existing users!

They are 3 types of plans - Monthly, Weekly and Daily plans. Depending on the length of my stay, I may not want to get the monthly plan although I must say the amount of data (up to 13GB) is much more attractive than the rest since I'll be using it as hotspot for my whole family!

For weekly plans, it's 2GB for RM10 and 5GB for RM19. The daily plan consist only of 1GB and 2GB plan which cost RM3 and 5 respectively. 

Honestly this is quite reasonable but whether it's enough, that really depends. If you want to use it for data sharing (Hotspot or Mifi) then you might have to think twice! 2GB will definite dry out in a day or 2! 5GB might be enough but will be tight for even a small family of 4, depending on usage of course! (In my previous post - 4G LTE Pocket Mifi Router, I discovered that 2 hours of usage of some YT in SD, GPS and web browsing used up almost 1GB of data (0.8+ GB).)

However, there is still one more option. You can choose to top up your SP instead, this will be good if you do travel to Malaysia often or plan to travel there again within the next 2 years. You don't have to worry about wastage (unused data)

The data will stay valid for as long as your card last, meaning it could possibly last for multiple trips. But of course it all depends on whether you're a heavy user or not. 

Thinking about it, if you divide it by the number of months left, it could go as low as SG$1.40/month! (assuming you buy 20GB of data - RM100 ~ SG$34 and your card still have about 25 months validity) 

If you worried about your SP expiring, SP validity can be extended - 6 months for RM18 and 12 for RM25. But depending on how much data you have left in the SP, it might be more worth it if you just sign up for a new card and enjoy the Welcome Deal and 28 months validity.

Well, I kinda regret not choosing my Welcome Deal more carefully and now I am stuck in a situation that I might have wasted the value of the card and all the unused data! I mean it's valid for 28 months and I didn't plan for that, instead went for the short term plan. Now, if I do need to visit Malaysia again, I have to choose between topping up (which cost more than if I just get a Welcome Deal with data in SP) or getting another card!

The only consolation is ... IF the connection is poor, I can easily ditch this card and find another one for my next trip!