There are only three GSM carriers in Belgium:

  • Base (Telenet)
  • Orange (formerly Mobistar)
  • Proximus

There are also some MVNOs, which offer their own plans but they are just a middleman service to one of the above three. I have no idea what the MVNOs offer apart from Mobile Vikings. There are many in different small hole-in-the-wall shops. This is the pricing for data on the first two:

Base: €15 → 8gb for 2 months

A top-up of €15 comes with 4gb of data expiring a month later. That is bundled with €15 in call credit. So at the end of the month you still have €15 in call credit if you make no calls. Then you can spend €15 in call credit to get another 4gb with a 1 month expiration.

Orange: €15 → 9.5gb for 7 weeks

A top-up of €15 comes with 5gb of data expiring a month later. That is bundled with €15 in call credit. So at the end of the month you still have €15 in call credit if you make no calls. Then you can spend €5 in call credit to get another 1.5gb with a 1 week expiration. Every week that purchase can be repeated, obviously just 3 times (thus giving 3 weeks more).

Proximus: shit… doesn’t matter

Proximus discriminates against cash payers by giving them a quite shitty deal, so they should be avoided on general principle.

(MVNO) Mobile Vikings: €15 → 8gb for 1 month

This is obviously a junk deal because you pay the same price for the same volume at Base, but it’s only good for ½ as long.

Use it or lose it

It’s a shame these are use it or lose it policies. Even if you buy more data credit before expiry, your old residual credit does not rollover to the next term. Orange is more data for the money but you have 4 expirations to deal with, each of which are chances for lost data credit, compared to Base where you have just 2 expirations.

Crowd-sourcing appreciated

If anyone knows about what other MVNOs offer, please chime in.

updates

(MVNO) Lyca sells you an empty SIM card for €5, so already a bad deal. Then if you add €15 that can be used to buy 5gb data. But it comes with zero data, so in effect it becomes like double the cost of Orange.

(MVNO) Voo (merging with Orange) gives 10gb for €18 and that’s the bottom tier. So you must pay €3 more than Orange and the full balance is consumed by the 10gb. And of course you have use 10gb in the month or lose it. It’s obviously a worse deal than Orange.