Draytek 2860 (etc.) and the EE Osprey (original) as a USB modem

 

This is a slightly confusing thing to setup.

The Draytek 2860 (and later similar models) allows for a 3G (or more usefully now 4G) modem to be plugged in to one of the USB connections as an WAN (Internet) option.

There are some instrctions for a similar unit at:

https://www.draytek.co.uk/support/guides/2860-alcatel-l800-setup

These instructions also work well for the EE Osprey (original) which is based on the Alcatel Link Y855.

The Draytek also allows for a mobile phone hotspot to be the WAN2 connection but this may be less useful if WAN2 is the (or one) main WAN connections. 

Yahoo (and I guess AOL) email with Outlook 2021, Thunderbird etc.

 I noticed that with Thunderbird there seemed to be a 10,000 email limit on some of my accounts (I have a very old AOL account and a fairly old Yahoo).

This seemed annoying but no more until I tried adding those accounts to my updated Outlook client (now 2021).

At that point the 10,000 limit became a real pain.

Yes, both accounts could do with a bit of "tidying" but with everyone in the world trying to email me with "intersting offers" the accounts were well in excess of 10,000.

I could see all the emails in Yahoo's webmail but actually a real email account suits me better.

So....

A few searches later:

Confirmation of the problem

Why is an IMAP Inbox Only Displaying 10,000 Items When There are Many - Microsoft Community

and, maybe a fix

Download your email from Yahoo Mail with IMAP | New Mail for Desktop Help - SLN28681

Thanks to

RESOLVED - Yahoo!/AOL IMAP collection emails per folder limits (fookes.com)

The key change is to update the incoming server name:

export.imap.mail.yahoo.com 

(replacing imap.mail.yahoo.com)

for AOL

https://help.aol.com/articles/download-your-email-from-aol-mail-with-imap

similarly

export.imap.aol.com

Hope it helps.

PS

Both needed application specific passwords generated for Outlook 2021.

VW Polo 2014 DAB reception problems

 I have a 2014 VW Polo with a factory fitted AM/FM/DAB radio.

A few months back the DAB radio became less sensitive.

There doesn't seem to be anything I can find on the Internet about this so for anyone who has a similar problem, this is what I found out.

Firstly, there are two types of aerials on VW Polo cars of about that age. One has a flatter looking base, mine is the (earlier I think) more prominent base.

The base of my type is packed with electronics (something I suspected but only found out when I had the old one to take apart).

 

I bought a replacement (new from VW - it wasn't cheap!) and had it fitted.

This fixed the problem and restored the DAB reception.

If getting at the aerial base inside the car hadn't been so hard (a significant proportion of the overall cost was getting someone suitably skilled to take the car apart and fit the new aerial) I might have investigated the problem more.

The base seems to have two parts (possibly allowing for a DAB and non DAB version of the car) and two incoming co-ax leads, one with a black end and the other with a white connector on the end.

Each has a small connector in.

I did (and still do) wonder if the problem was either a seating problem in one connector (assuming one does the DAB, the other AM/FM) or (less likely) an earthing issue for the whole base. It has a nut with a pearcing collet as part of the fixings and that seems to need to go through the paint.

For a long time (and seperately) I had some electrical noise on weak AM signal reception which on first impressions, this new base also seems to have improved.

All in all and thus far, this seems to be fixed.

As a "garage fix", buying the new base and having it fitted was defititely the best bet. As a DIY job, some further investigation is probably merited before getting the replacement base.

For reference, the base seems to be part number 6R0 031 501 A, the nut 1J0 035 437 & the actual antenna 6R0 035 849 A. 

A tale of two soundcards: Tascam US-32 & Yamaha AG-03

 The rise of podcasting has been followed by manufacturers producing computer sound hardware specifically aimed at podcasters.

Tascam have produced the "MiNiSTUDIO PERSONAL US-32" (and US-42) and Yamaha the "AG03" (and AG06).

https://tascam.com/us/product/us-32/top

https://uk.yamaha.com/en/products/music_production/interfaces/ag_series/ag03.html

Both models have "larger" versions but I'll consider the US-32 & AG03.

Tascam US-32

The Tascam US-32 was the first of these devices I became aware of.

It looks very simple and CAN be simple to use but it is less revealing of function at first glance.

Both devices require driver/manager software and have simple and advanced ways of operation.

Essentially, the Tascam US-32 is primarily focussed on the use case of someone stereaming (perhaps a game play) and adding their talking (and some spot effects) to the output.

The computer sound outout (to the device headphones) is a mix of application sound from the computer plus effecst added into the Tascam US-32 driver triggered by the "PON" buttons.

That, plus a local mic, is returned as the sound card output and can then be (say) streamed or recorded.

There are a number of different modes that one might want to use in diffferent cases.

These require the windows settings application and are called Mode Presets.

BROADCAST is the default, 

Talking is suitable for (say) Skype calls in that the computer audio isn't returned to the PC.

Quite what "Talking with PON/BGM" is intended to achieve is less obvious to me in that ony the local user hears the PON sounds

There is also a "Podcast Multi-Channel" mode that would be potentially useful when recording a podcast for later post production.

All in all, the Tascam US-32 is quite capable but not that clear (from the control surface) about what is going on.

The metering is quite usable.

Yamaha AG-03

The Yamaha AG-03 was the first of these two devices I actually bought.

It addresses the different operating modes by a switch which has one setting where the audio from the PC is mixed into the input (for streaming PC audio) and another where it isn't (for two way conversations).

As the hardware control is more obvious, the software doesn't allow routing mode selection.

Generally the Yamaha AG-03 is easy to use in most applications. My one complaint is that the monitor mute applies to both headphones and the speaker outputs.

The "metering" is very basic and I would say inadequate for many applications. Hopefully your applicationhas audio level meters.

My single extra feature request would be to have a headphone only audio stream from the PC (using ASIO) which would allow a cue feed while looping the man PC sound to a stream.

 

 

TuneBlade - The Windows way in to AirPlay

I like AirPlay.

I have a couple of Apple Airport Express units connected to HiFi units and use AirPlay to take audio from iOS devices to them.

AirPlay is also supported on Mac computers but not on Windows computers.

This is where TuneBlade comes in. It intercepts the audio to your PC sound output and sends it to an AirPlay device.

The free trial was enough to very quickly convince me it was worth paying £7.99 for.

Basically it "just works".

The (necessary) disadvantage is that it installs "Bonjour" on your computer (if you don't already have it from an Apple piece of software) but that doesn't seem to have been a practical problem.

All in all, highly recommended.

http://www.tuneblade.com

The "Maplin" LAN Disk and Windows 10

My first steps into Network Attached Storage (NAS) drives were the Maplin LAN disk.

I've moved on to "greater" devices since but the old LAN Disks were still in the cupboard.

One had a fairly decent (by previous standards) 500GB disk and I thought I would fire it up to see if it still worked (with Windows 10).

The short answer is that you need to give it a static IP address (by reservation in my case) and create a share (I called it "share" ) via the Web interface but once you have done that it is possible to map a network drive using 192.168.x.xxx/share (as appropriate) in the "This PC" part of file explorer.

Result !

The ( Roland ) Edirol UA-25 and Windows 10

There are times when I discover something in the process of getting a piece of technology to work and feel the need to spread the news, this is one such occasion.

The Edirol UA-25 us a good quality sound card with (for me) the key feature of an analogue limiter built in.

You can thus feed a signal into it close to digital peak level without the risk of clipping.

However there isn't a Windows 10 driver.

A thorough Googling leads you to some excellent instructions for overcoming this at:

http://forum.cakewalk.com/Getting-your-devices-to-work-with-Windows-10-m3267234.aspx#3267234


I can confirm that this worked fine on my 32 bit Windows 10 installation.

I found that just updating the unknown device with the driver (once modified) and accepting all the unsigned driver warnings was enough to overcome the problem.

I didn't need to do the switch for unsigned drivers command.

Use your Edirol UA-25 on Windows 10 and enjoy !

A new life for a Dell Latitude 10 ST2 with Windows 10

I write about things that have caused me problems but I take my hat off to people who toil with challenging computer problems and when they solve them, document the solution for the assistance of others.

One such writer, to whom I shall be eternally grateful is the author of this article on upgrading a dell Latitude 10 ST2 tablet to Windows 10.

http://blog.asiantuntijakaveri.fi/2015/02/windows-10-install-from-usb-to-dell.html?m=1

The Dell position is that this isn't supported.

Actually, if you can overcome a few hurdles that Dell place in the way the tablet will run an early version of Windows 10 extremely well.

Also, and to my relief, the Windows 10 install seems to have an acceptable licence by virtue of the previous Windows 8 or 8.1 install.

Fantastic !

The Barix Exstreamer 100

The Barix Exstreamer is a hardware audio stream player.

https://www.barix.com/audio-products/exstreamer-family/barix/Product/show/exstreamer-100-105-110-120/

I bought a Barix Exstreamer second hand "as sold".

The unit has a neat feature that it speaks the IP address from the audio output (thus avoiding any challenges of finding the IP address out). Having found the IP address and got to a point where I could look at it (a spare broadband router was handy to get a 192.168.192.xx network), I pointed a browser at it hoping for a setup page. My guess is the unit had been set with a static IP address suiting the network it had been used on.

Sadly all I saw was a password screen:



It didn't seem to have any obvious default passwords and was probably protected for its former application.

Fortunately the Exstreamer 100 has a way of regaining control when you are presented with a problem like that, you can reflash the unit with stock firmware using serial.

One of my older computers has a "proper" serial port so I got hold of a crossed 9 pin serial cable (null modem) and the required firmware.

I used streaming_client_kit_vb230_20120921 and a Google should find you a set of similar software.

It is all available (after registration) from the Barix website but I found that the registration email turned up in my spam filter so sourced the firmware elsewhere.

What you need is in the folder called update_rescue so look there.

Assuming you have com port 1 as your serial port click on the serial1.bat file and is should start.

 You then connect the serial cable to the Exstreamer 100 and power the unit up.



Something similar to the above should be seen. Eventually (all being well) the replacement firmware should be on the Exstreamer.

It reboots, and once it picks up an address by DHCP, you should see the status page.



They have a "test"streaming service so my unit started to produce music.

Unit fixed !

There is a very handy Yahoo Group for the Barix Exstreamer which has old posts you might find helpful and a file collection which includes the required software.

2022 Update:

The Barix Yahoo Group (and Yahoo Groups in general) has gone.

Barix have an area on their website to get firmware etc.

Getting the data off a dead Buffalo Linkstation.....

Perhaps unsurprisingly given my "recovering a Buffalo Linkstation" post from September last year, come the start of January I have a dead Buffalo Linkstation HS-DH750GL as it died again.

After the September experience I had instigated fairly regular "Sync Toy" runs to back up the Linkstation HS-DH750GL to a WD MyCloud and a Synology NAS DS216se.

The way I worked, the Linkstation HS-DH750GL was my "working" store so when it broke I was only a few days of data lost but it was unfortunate.

Investigation suggested that the drive was OK and when I put it in a USB caddy and connected it to my Raspberry Pi, to my immense surprise the data partition "mounted" and all my files were there.

The drive isn't easily visible on a Windows machine as it has a Linux format and partition scheme.

I had a spare 1TB drive (the WD Blue that my PC seemed to not like) and so bought another Synology NAS case (a DS115j this time)  and fitted it to that.

After an hour of Synology initiation "stuff" it was all up and running with an empty 1TB drive. Unlike the old WD Blue 650GB there are no S.M.A.R.T. error reports on the 1GB drive so it seems OK to use.

The Synology NAS drive was seen by the Raspberry Pi as a server and by copy and paste I set the Raspberry Pi to clone the ex Linkstation 750GB drive (about 600GB of stuff) to the Synology NAS.

It isn't fast (about 48 hours) but is doing it..

Once I've got the data all on the new Synology, I'll have another go with the Linkstation HS-DH750GL but I think the PSU might be on the way out. There is a bit of a "capacitor" smell to it.

Repairing a Behringer DSP9024

I have a Behringer DSP9024.

For those unfamiliar with the unit, it can be considered a "poor mans Optimod" as it does split band audio dynamic range reduction.

While I wouldn't consider it suitable for use before an A.M. transmitter, for taming audio before a web stream it is ideal, and that's what I use mine for.

Unfortunately it broke with what I now know is a common failure mode (all the lights on the front panel flash and it "hangs" half way through booting).

A google suggested that the PSU capacitor C65 which seems to do a logic rail is the common fault. It is 16V/2200uF and mine looked like it might have been previously replaced.

I replaced it with a recommended 25v/3300uF and to my great relief the Behringer DSP9024 is mended.

Even now, a second hand replacement would cost £80 on eBay and there is nothing obvious for less than 4 figures that would do a similar job. Behringer make a 2 band unit but I suspect the DSP9024 does a better job (if less easy to set up).

The perfect unit would be a combination of the Behringer DSP9024 and a Shoutcast server.

Orban make something like that but it costs about £5k.

Anyway, the Behringer DSP9024 is mended for now.

Good luck if yours breaks.

Installing Shoutcast DNAS on a Raspberry Pi

Well this was surprisingly painful (mostly because of my complete ineptness with Linux) and I made numerous "schoolboy errors" but because I've now had to do this twice and the second time seemed more painful that the first I'll write it down.

That way if I need to do it a third time perhaps it will be easier.

I already have Icecast running on the Raspberry Pi and that complicated matters slightly as that uses port 8000 by default.

That was a simple install as it is "available" in the repository for the Raspberry Pi.

I found most Shoutcast help focused on Windows or other forms of Linux.

Once I had found a source of DNAS 2.4.7 (In my case where I had previously kept a copy, as the more recent versions seem to require registration to download) and un-archived it to a suitable folder it was a question of what to do next.

To cut a long story short I needed to edit sc_serv_simple.conf

I needed to add PortBase=9000 (to shift the default server port from 8000 where it clashed with Icecast) and edit the stream and admin passwords to two different passwords. This was all done using nano and written out to the same file.

nano sc_serv_simple.conf

Finally run the server

./sc_serv sc_serv_simple.conf

and it worked.

Recovering A Buffalo Linkstation HS-DH750GL

I've a couple of these, one I bought new in 2009 and the second from eBay a couple of years later.

The power went off last night while I was out and when I came home a few things were upset (less than there used to be !) but my two Buffalo NAS units were offline.

I turned them back on, one came back no trouble, the other didn't want to come back online correctly.

I could ping it but no sign of the web interface.

A bit of Googling later I had downloaded Buffalo's NAS Navigator.

This showed one NAS as OK but the other as in "Emergency Mode".

I suspected that for some reason, the power failure had upset the firmware on the broken NAS

Further Googling led me to Buffalo's firmware updater tool.

I downloaded the version appropriate to the HS-DH750GL and it found the broken NAS.

I let it run but at reboot it seemed to fail and said that the update had failed.

I then power cycled the NAS from the front panel and to my relief and surprise it came back good.

Whatever the updater had done seemed to have fixed things.

If you come here with a similar problem I hope that this happens for you !

I'm now running my SyncToy backup to copy this NAS onto a Western Digital "MyCloud" which I bought to back up the two Buffalo units.

The second duff WD Blue disc - now bought a Firecuda

I may have been unlucky but I've just had my second duff WD Blue disc in my ageing desktop.

The desktop is an Acer X3300 and is about seven years old.

The first WD Blue gave me a S.M.A.R.T. failure alarm one day so I wanted a quick replacement disk and bought the same make and model just a bit bigger (1GB vs 650MB).

That installed OK and I used Windows 7 backup and restore to migrate.

Fast forward to about two and a half years and the second WD Blue started being very laggy.

It could sometimes take tens of seconds to seek and the general PC performance was dreadful.

I wondered if it was a driver issue or something broken by one of the Windows 10 updates.

I tried a "refresh" which helped with a laptop but that didn't do much on the desktop.

I decided to bite the bullet and buy another disc.

This time I thought, the Firecuda seems to offer performance improvements and would cost perhaps £20 more. A quick Amazon order and here was a new disc.

Then, how to migrate.

Windows 10 backup and restore wouldn't work (an early indication that all was not well) so I tried the Seagate tool. That didn't like the hard disc USB caddy and had some unfathomable sector size problem, so I replaced the DVD drive with the new Firecuda and set the copy to work. There were complaints about unreadable source sectors but they could be set to be ignored (on the basis that the old system worked) and the copy completed.

Perhaps not ideal but massively less work that another re-installation (although I knew how to do that as I had done the refresh a few weeks ago).

I did a chkdsk /r on the new disc to see if anything duff had been copied and when I looked at the machine next morning all seemed well.

This far (a few days in) I'm very impressed with the Firecuda. It was 1GB 7200 RPM 3.5 inch format and has transformed the machine from frustrating to a pleasure to use.

As a simple upgrade on an aging machine that didn't justify a large SSD it seems good.

Sadly the WD warranty on my disc is two years.

I suppose it was OK for the £40 I paid for it and I've not lost data but I won't rush to buy another WD Blue.

Windows 10 "refresh" on the HP Mini 110-3700

It was never the fastest of computers but my HP Mini 110 had been running increasingly slowly.

I have taken the free upgrade to Windows 10 from the Windows 7 starter edition it came with and while everything worked it was all a bit slow (or very slow if you were impatient !).

I wanted to clean it out and start again with a cleanish install to limit all the stuff that wanted to run on startup.

My concern was that I would lose the "bundled" Office 2010 Starter Edition (which came with Windows 7) if I did a refresh.

A Google suggested that there was a Click to Run Bootstrapper that would reinstall it.

I decided to give it a go.

At the first attempt the refresh process seemed to get stuck (or perhaps I was impatient).

I had a second attempt and gave it a couple of hours to do its stuff.

Everything seemed to work OK  in Operating Systems terms and it certainly seemed no worse in speed terms and was perhaps a bit better.

Loads of stuff had been removed and I carefully picked a few drivers and programs to put back.

HP offer driver downloads (Windows 7 only) at:

https://support.hp.com/us-en/drivers/selfservice/hp-mini-110-3700-pc-series/5082187/model/5082189

but actually I didn't need any of these, I previously had a full set of working drivers under Windows 10 and those all seemed to survive working although lots of drivers were in the "removed programs" list.

Restoring the Office 2010 Starter Edition was a bit more tricky.

The bootstrap installer " setupconsumerc2rolw.exe " was mildly hard to find

https://windowsten.info/filedata/fetch?id=4179&d=1426944590 seems a source but I used

https://www.technibble.com/forums/threads/get-your-office-2010-starter-edition-download-here.73121/

A very useful post by " Metanis " gave the following:

http://www.techspot.com/downloads/6255-microsoft-office-starter-2010.html

He also correctly points out that if you install this after doing a clean OS installation it won't run (not compatible with this version of windows) until until you install https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2598285

After that my Office 2010 Starter Edition seems to work and any light document editing of spreadsheeting seems to work fine.

All in all it seems better and I won't be installing much more on the machine to attempt to keep it running OK.

Acer Extensa 5220 and Windows 7

I've had an old laptop with Windows XP Professional on it for probably 10 years.

Vista was current when I bought it but I wanted XP to use with some other stuff.

Now XP is well out of support and I wanted another machine to run some fairly undemanding applications but XP wasn't really usable.

I could have bought another machine but I would have really wanted a machine with an SSD and this was going to be many hundreds of pounds.

So....

Looking at e-bay, I could buy a (spinning disk) HD for about £10 and some sort of "recycled" Windows 7 licence for a few pounds and that looked OK, but would the hardware all work ?

Fitting the hard disk was a doddle. The bottom panel comes off easily for service (unlike the newer machines) and it was the work of minutes to put the new SSD in.

The licence came with a link to download the required ISO for an install disk and I burnt that to a DVD.

A fiddle in the BIOS to get the boot sequence to start off DVD and it all booted to the install DVD.

That did it's stuff for a couple of hours and Windows 7 32 bit was running OK on the laptop. Not what one might call "zippy" but OK.

The laptop has 2GB of RAM and 160GB of hard disk.

I triggered windows update and it found 190 ish to do.

I left it to it.

Also the Internet Explorer wanted an update but was so old it didn't seem to want to download a new version.

It would install Chrome so I did that, then downloaded a newer IE using Chrome.

Finally I had a working computer but two devices that were not recognised.

The WiFi is fine (except that the physical switch state isn't remembered over a reboot so WiFi always starts "on") but I wanted the two devices to have drivers.

The first device which talked about "communications" was an infrared device which Windows found a driver for itself after having a try online.

The mass storage device driver couldn't be found.

A good Googling got me to an Acer driver site (as well as a number of other dodgy sites !)

https://www.acer.com/ac/en/GB/content/support-product/714?b=1

That had a card reader driver which sorted the final mystery device and also a driver for infrared which I didn't try (as this was fixed and I've never used it).

So Acer Extensa 5220 working fine (if a bit slowly) on Windows 7. It is a "mains laptop" as the battery seems poorly but for a limited application usable and saved from the electrical recycling for a few years.

Mid 2007 MacBook upgrade with a new SSD

I've a "mid 2007" MacBook which I had previously upgraded to 2GB of RAM and OSX 10.6 (from the as supplied 10.4) but it was a bit sluggish.

While it didn't merit further substantial investment a few tens of pounds would buy a new "unbranded" SSD of the same size as the original (120GB) and that seemed to be money well spent.

I also bought a USB SATA enclosure and downloaded a trial copy of a disk cloner for Mac. After a few hours I had a bootable SSD (hold "alt" on boot to get a choice).

A quick Google and the instructions for getting in to the part of the laptop where the hard disk is to be found were located (take the battery out and use a small cross head to remove the cover).

The tab to get the SSD out worked well and that point I hit the first snag. The existing SSD was mounted on a meal tray by four Torx T6 screws and I didn't have a Torx screwdriver.

Afre some minor abuse of some other screwdrivers I got the Torx screws out and fitted the SSD using the same screws (and tool).

It went back in (once I got it the right way up !) and to my delight (and relief) the machine booted (perhaps a bit slowly).

Everything seemed to work but I got spells of "spinning beachball". Google suggested a reset (no obvious value) and repairing permissions (via disk utility) which seemed to generally fix the problem.

Thus far the SSD seems a success. I've ignored "TRIM" thus far. Further reports as needed.

UPDATE DECEMBER 2017

The "unbranded" SSD failed after a few months. They sent a replacement (after I sent the broken one back to China tracked for £10) but I decided a "normal" HDD drive of a larger size (500GB) and 7200 RPM (rather than the original 5400 RPM) was the best way to go.

That is now working fine and I won't be buying cheap SSDs again. The replacement SSD is in a low spec Windows 7 machine which runs 24x7 and going OK so far.

T-Mobile 6 Month Web Booster - How far can you go ?

As previously noted, I'm in the last T-Mobile 6 month Internet booster I'll ever have.

A few days away from home in a hotel with broken Internet access (no DHCP on the router - a common problem with "guest" WiFi in hotels and elsewhere) and I used the T-Mobile 6 month Internet booster for tethering various media consuming devices.

When I went away I had used about 500MB in the month (so half of the 1GB "fair use policy" allowance).

The usage quickly went up, after 24 hours a couple of GB more had been used, half way through the following day the 80% of the FUP text came. About 6 hours later the "exceeded fair use policy" text arrived.

This seems to have triggered limited download and upload speeds of about 500kb/s (perhaps a quarter of what T-Mobile 3G can achieve in peak periods from my experience).

I'm now at 5.2GB used in the calendar month for £3.33.

This is why the offer had to end !

Stopping iOS updates and getting rid of downloaded but not installed updates

The following is a note derived from the following extremely useful post by SergZak at:

https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-9741


I don't want my iOS devices updated to iOS 10 as they work well at the moment and I've previously found Apple allow devices to be updated to a point at which their performance suffers.

To stop updates I've blocked mesu.apple.com using OpenDNS (which I use on my router).

I've also deleted the previously downloaded update by finding the iOS update app at:

Settings

General

Storage & iCloud Usage

Manage Storage. 

There I found the iOS update app. By tapping on the app I could delete the app.

Once again, many thanks SergZak !

The end of the T-Mobile 6MONTHWEB booster

Sadly the T-Mobile £20 for 6 months Internet data offer is ending (or has ended depending on when you read this).

Not much has been made of this but I happened across mention of it on the Thinkbroadband forums.

A further well targeted Google and the sad news was confirmed.

To ensure that nobody will buy it again the price has been doubled.

In a slight breach of copyright (I see it as review) but to ensure that this change isn't airbrushed out of mobile network history this is what EE (T-Mobile) have to say on the subject:

T-Mobile pay as you go price increase

Why we're increasing your prices

We know they’re not popular but we haven’t actually increased any of our rates since 2013, and in that time the costs of running our business have continued to rise. Our EE pay as you go rates are staying the same and you can buy packs of minutes, data and texts to get even better value.

Find out more about switching seamlessly to EE by visiting one of our stores or go to ee.co.uk/movetoee.

How will I know if my price is increasing?

All customers who are impacted by the price increase will be contacted. You will receive a minimum of 30 days' written notice (via text) notifying you before the increase takes place.

What the 2016 T-Mobile pay as you go price rises mean for you

From 10 October 2016 we’ll be making changes to the costs of some internet boosters on T-Mobile.

Please see below the new charges for your internet booster:

Internet Booster	Length	Before 10 Oct 2016	From 10 Oct 2016
Blackberry monthly data booster - Unlimited browsing	30 days	£5	£12
Standard monthly data booster - not Blackberry	30 days	£5	£12
Standard 6 month data booster - not Blackberry	6 months	£20	£40
Blackberry 6 month data booster	6 months	£20	£40

From:

http://ee.co.uk/help/add-ons-benefits-and-plans/price-plans-and-costs/t-mobile-price-plans/t-mobile-pay-as-you-go-price-increase

on 07/10/16

The excellent Money Saving Expert also covers the change:

http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/news/phones/2016/09/data-booster-prices-double-for-t-mobile-customers

The T-Mobile data offer was the best PAYG data offer for years (I guess I have been using it for more than 5 years) and I'm sorry to see it go. My "high score" was 2GB in a calendar month, not bad for £3.33 !

Having put £18 on the SIM to buy my last 6 Months of WEB perhaps I'll get a PAYG upgrade from Carphone Warehouse with the SIM as well before it goes in the bin.

The best offers now seem to the the EE 6GB/3 month offers which can be ebayed for less that £20 or the 3 3GB/3 months for about £10. I guess the market price of these will increase as the "6 Month Web" buyers go somewhere else.

T-Mobile "So long, and thanks for all the data"