At €8.99 Is Lidl Connect as good as Eir? Yes, with one small catch

Lidl Connect goes on sale on Monday 5 October, and it’s the cheapest way onto a mobile network in Ireland. For €8.99 a month, you get unlimited calls, texts and 5G data, 50GB of roaming data and 100 international minutes, all supported by Eir’s network. That price is locked in for life for the first 100,000 customers who sign up through the Lidl Plus app by 31 December, after which the plan costs €12.99.

To put that in context, my roundup of the best SIM-only deals in Ireland has 48 on top at €9.99 a month, but that’s a six-month offer before the price goes back to €12.99. Lidl Connect’s €8.99 is for life, which makes it by far the best offer on the Irish market. Numbers-wise, this move is a no-brainer. Quality-wise, it remains to be seen.

As soon as it was announced, the comments online all circled the same worry. People wanted to know what the catch was, and whether Lidl customers would be treated as second-class citizens on Eir’s network.

To find out what’s going on under the bonnet, I spoke with Luke Kehoe, Lead Analyst at Ookla, the company behind Speedtest. Ookla already has test data from Lidl Connect SIMs, and while there is a catch, I don’t think it’s going to put many off.

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Will Lidl Connect get the same coverage as Eir and Gomo?

Yes. Lidl Connect uses the exact same masts as Eir and GoMo, so wherever you get signal on Eir, you’ll get it on Lidl Connect. Wherever you see 4G or 5G, Luke told me, “it’s identical to what you’d have on GoMo or on Eir domestically”. Download and upload speeds are broadly the same as Eir’s own customers get too.

You’ll still hear people say they never get coverage on Lidl Connect in the pub when they always did on Eir. It’s not true. There are variables like the phone using or the room you’re in using that can make a difference, but the masts are the same.

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So if Lidl Connect customers do get a slightly different experience, it won’t be down to coverage or being pushed to the back of the queue. It’s down to how Lidl Connect is built.

Where Lidl Connect is different from Eir and Gomo

A mobile network relies on two main physical things. The masts carry the signal between your phone and the network. Second is the core – the network’s switchboard, checking that your SIM and plan are active and sending your calls, texts and data where they need to go. On both Eir and GoMo, all of that happens in Ireland, so your data goes from your phone to the mast, through Eir’s core in Dublin and out to the internet.

Lidl sells Lidl Connect, but it’s run by 1GLOBAL, a telecoms company that specialises primarily in travel eSIMs. Your data still travels over Eir’s masts and network, but before it reaches the internet, it takes a detour through 1GLOBAL’s gateways, which in pre-launch testing, appear to be located in London or Amsterdam, then comes back the same way.

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The reason is likely cost. Luke told me it’s “simply cheaper to route the traffic through there than to go build another full core network in Dublin”. An Irish core would be a serious expense, and I’m sure nobody wants to add that to a business selling SIMs for €8.99 a month.

It has been reported that 1GLOBAL does have some Irish core infrastructure, so potentially it could come online at a later date. But not yet.

The catch is latency

Ookla started seeing Lidl Connect test SIMs in its Speedtest data from 13 May, most likely in the hands of Lidl staff. Their median latency was 59.6 milliseconds versus just 32.5 milliseconds for Eir’s own customers on the same network. That’s an extra 26 milliseconds, or nearly double the latency.

Latency is the time between your phone asking for something and the answer coming back. Think back to the news in the 90s, when the presenter in the studio asked a reporter in the field a question and there was an awkward wait before the reporter heard it and started answering. That wait is latency. It’s the same concept here, but don’t expect the impact to be anywhere near as dramatic as that newscast. Lidl Connect’s extra delay is 26 thousandths of a second, a fraction of the time it takes to blink.

In certain circumstances you may feel a bit of lag, but for the vast majority of people it won’t be perceptible. Luke agreed, saying that for everyday users “the difference would be not massively perceptible, especially for browsing the web, using TikTok, Instagram, anything like that”. Sending photos and downloading updates won’t be affected at all. Where you might notice it is on video calls and gaming, and when you’re at home, you’re on your Wi-Fi anyway.

Important note here for parents. If your kids are avid mobile gamers, Lidl Connect probably isn’t a great idea, because those extra milliseconds are the difference between landing a headshot or taking one. I also wouldn’t stick a Lidl Connect SIM in a router to run your home broadband. Luke called that “something to test and try”, but I’ll be more blunt. If you’re planning to run your entire gaming setup off it, I think it’ll be a disaster.

This is pre-launch data, and Luke did say “that’s the test data that we have for Lidl, so I would stress that could change after launch”. With 1GLOBAL’s gateways sitting in London and Amsterdam, though, I wouldn’t expect the picture to change much.

Sky Mobile customers already live with this

Lidl Connect isn’t the first Irish mobile brand to send data abroad before it reaches the internet. Sky Mobile, An Post Mobile and Lycamobile do the same. Ookla’s data puts Sky Mobile at 62.3 milliseconds and An Post Mobile at 69.0, so Lidl’s test SIMs sit level with Sky and ahead of An Post. By comparison, Ookla’s data shows that Tesco Mobile is the only MVNO that doesn’t see any latency penalty because all of the network’s traffic is routed through a core in Ireland.

Here’s the telling bit. Over the past two years, Sky Mobile has gained more switchers than any other mobile brand in Ireland, according to Ookla. If latency was putting ordinary people off, Sky would be losing customers, not winning them. As Luke put it, latency “is nothing new for the MVNOs in the Irish market, like Sky, which is similar and which has done very well itself”.

Lidl Connect roaming could be one of Ireland’s best

While the latency is brought into the picture because of 1GLOBAL’s involvement, they also bring some big positives to the table. 50GB of roaming data is massive. I’ve hit roaming limits of

around 18GB with Three when away for a week or two. Lidl’s allowance is high, right up there with the likes of Eir, whose SIM-only plan comes with 65GB, and Vodafone who offer up to 80GB on some bill pay plans.

That allowance comes from 1GLOBAL’s existing roaming agreements, not Eir. Luke says he “would have a lot more confidence in the roaming integration here because of 1GLOBAL”, adding “that’s their whole bread and butter”.

Given how often roaming trips up budget brands, as I covered in why EU roaming fails on cheap Irish SIM-only plans, that’s a genuine selling point.

What to expect when Lidl Connect launches

Expect some teething problems. Lidl Plus coped with the rush for Katie Taylor pre-sale tickets, but a network launch has more moving parts, from setting up eSIMs to moving people’s numbers across. I had GoMo when it launched at €9.99 and got rid of it quite quickly because the launch was disastrous, for me at least. I’m willing to roll the dice again here, so I’ll be picking up my SIM on Monday and living with whatever launch issues come with it, through gritted teeth.

Neither Luke nor I can confirm yet whether Lidl Connect supports Wi-Fi calling or 4G calling (VoLTE), which GoMo and Clear Mobile both offer. The good news is that it’s a rolling monthly plan you can cancel at any time, so trying it costs very little.

Should you switch to Lidl Connect?

For most people, yes. You get the same masts and speeds as Eir, potentially one of the best roaming allowances going, and a price nobody else in Ireland matches. The trade-off is a small bump in latency that most people will never notice.

Even Luke, who, as he said himself obsessed with network performance, would make the move himself. “I would still likely be very happy to use this as primary connection in my phone, but the proof will be in the pudding with further testing after launch”, he told me.

The caveat that both he and I would make is that all of this is based on pre-launch test data. It could turn out to be absolutely atrocious, with all of us running away from it just as quick. Still, for €8.99 a month, I’ll grin and bear a few launch problems if they can work them out.

And boy, are the Irish public switching. Ookla’s data also shows that Vodafone and Three are the biggest losers in the Irish market, with Sky, an MVNO with average latency greater than that of Lidl Connect, being the biggest winners. That tells me that the only negative on paper doesn’t make much different to most people who’ve switched in recent years.

Lidl Connect goes on sale on 5 October through the Lidl Plus app, as an eSIM or a 99c physical SIM from any of Lidl’s 192 Irish stores, and you can see everything included in Lidl Connect’s €8.99 plan in my launch piece.

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