Giga! Review: New Telco Not Without Flaws, But Very Promising

Launched on 30 May 2019, giga! is a sub-brand from StarHub offering a fully digital mobile service. Piggybacking on StarHub’s infrastructure and network, giga! operates independently and offers a pretty compelling mobile plan.

For 25GB of data, 1000 minutes of talktime, 1000 SMSes and free caller ID, it’ll just cost you S$25 a month. Granted, it might not be as cheap as some other telcos out there that are offering around the same amount of data, but the amount of talktime and SMSes giga! is offering is one of the highest as far as I know.

More than that, giga! is the first telco to allow data rollover for two months. So if you only use 10GB in a given month, the remaining 15GB will be added to the next month’s data allowance for a total of 40GB. How great is that?

But all that is useless if the network isn’t stable enough to compete with other telcos. I’ve tested the network and can happily report that it’s just as stable as the regular StarHub network would be. In places that my StarHub phone has two bars of reception, the giga! phone also had two bars of reception.

While testing the speed of the network on Speedtest.net however, the provider that’s listed is still StarHub, which might be just because giga! is using their infrastructure.

Moving onto the app that handles everything, from registration to the first ever all-digital ID verification and payment, I initially was quite frustrated. It took a while to get past the ID verification because of an error that continually happened for about a day, before being resolved at night.

In addition, the app was laggy, taking an average of 15 seconds to start up each time and crashed every time I tried to open my profile to change my avatar.

I’m pleased to say that some much-needed tweaks have been made though. The app has been updated at least four times in the last four days, and while some content heavy pages like the FAQ are still a little laggy, the main page loads within five seconds.

Crashes are also non-existent on my Samsung Note 9, but it does occur occasionally on my iPhone 7 Plus. I’m sure the giga! team is still optimising the app, but I do hope older phone models will be included in the optimisation.

The one feature I’ve yet to test out is the Jetset giga! feature, which is their roaming plan. For S$5, users will get 1GB of roaming data that’s valid for five days from the time they reach their travel destination. Right now, it’s only available in 14 countries such as Australia, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, New Zealand and more.

The roaming data is supposedly valid across any network in the destination country so that’s neat, and I’ll definitely be trying it out on my next trip. The next best thing is that giga! provides overseas users with free incoming text messages, so if you’re trying to access a website that requires an OTP sent to your phone, you’ll be able to without having to pay for overseas texts.

There has been a plethora of new mobile plans coming out from telcos lately, and we’re coming out with an article comparing each of those plans soon, so stay tuned!