How to pick a mobile tariff by what you actually use

Most people pick a tariff on two questions: how many gigabytes, and what it costs. Hidden between them is a third one, and it is the one that decides the bill — what happens when the package runs out. The same gigabyte costs 900 UZS bought in advance as part of a package, and 102,400 once you go over the limit.

Below: where to find your own usage, what the bill is actually made of, why headroom is cheaper than thrift here, how to compare seven operators, and what the word “unlimited” means in the small print.

The starting point is not the feeling that “I have enough”, but four numbers from last month: gigabytes, minutes, SMS and everything charged on top of the monthly fee. The operator shows the first three itself; the fourth has to be pieced together from the payment history — and it is the one that ruins the maths.

One month proves nothing: a trip or a week without home Wi-Fi doubles the total. Take three full months and work with the typical figure rather than the average — the average of 12, 14 and 40 gigabytes is 22, while your ordinary month is 13.

It is the third part that turns a cheap tariff into an expensive one. On Mobiuz tariffs, traffic over the limit is charged at 100 UZS a megabyte, rounded up on every kilobyte. In gigabytes that is 102,400. On Ucell Bor 70 it is 25 UZS a megabyte, or 25,600 a gigabyte — a third of the monthly fee for one gigabyte too many.

The same gigabyte bought in advance is two orders of magnitude cheaper. Monthly Mobiuz packages: 1 GB for 11,000 UZS, 10 GB for 50,000, 50 GB for 75,000, 100 GB for 90,000 — roughly 900 UZS a gigabyte.

The usual advice — work out your usage, take slightly more and do not pay for the rest — assumes that twice the package costs twice as much. On Uzbek price lists it does not.

UZMOBILE Balance gives 20 GB for 65,000 UZS, Beeline YORQIN 70 GB for 70,000, and Mobiuz Mazza 70 gives 150 GB for that same 70,000. The same volume costs different amounts from different operators too: 150 GB on UZMOBILE Ideal Plus is 85,000 UZS, while 200 GB on Mobile Lux is 101,000 against 110,000 for the same 200 GB on Ucell Bor 110, which adds 100 GB on the 5G network.

So the rule that replaces “buy what you use”: work out your volume, then look at the price of the next tier up. If the difference is smaller than the price of a single extra package, take the higher tier. The table below filters by volume and price.

The market has Beeline, Ucell, Uzmobile under the UZTELECOM brand, Mobiuz, Humans, OQ Mobile and Perfectum. The last three are built differently from the first four, and that changes the question of how much you need.

OQ Mobile assembles a tariff out of ready-made bundles: TAKOYCHA — 10 GB plus another 15 GB of TAS-IX for 45,000 UZS, OPPOQ — 65 GB and 2,000 minutes for 63,500, OLOV — 85 GB for 68,000, INJIQ — unlimited internet for 78,000. The first three add 200 GB of night-time traffic.

Humans keeps two extremes: the free Tekin with 100 MB and 33 minutes, and Super VIP at 45,000 UZS, where internet, calls and SMS are all unlimited and the billing period is 30 days. Perfectum runs the Qulay line — from 0.6 GB at 25,000 UZS to 45 GB at 130,000 — plus a separate 5G tariff, A'lo 5G: 1,000 GB, 1,000 minutes and 1,000 SMS for 100,000 UZS at speeds up to 1 Gbps.

“Unlimited” in a tariff almost never means “as much traffic as you like”. The Beeline YORQIN terms describe it as a list: the gigabytes for social networks, messengers, YouTube, IMO, AI services and PUBG MOBILE are spent “when using the official apps and within a defined set of IP addresses” — and the owners of those services change the addresses.

Two consequences follow from the same terms. Through a proxy or a VPN the privileged traffic does not work: it is billed as ordinary traffic. And the unlimited allowance ends together with the main package — with no main traffic left, the included traffic for social networks, YouTube and IMO becomes unavailable. Background use, meanwhile, never stops: system and app updates, widget syncing, analytics pings. The full text is on the tariff page for Beeline YORQIN.

One cost sits apart: the unused remainder. A package does not roll over — gigabytes paid for but not spent are wiped on the date the monthly fee is charged. So what is expensive about a tariff with headroom is not the extra volume, which costs almost nothing, but the minutes and SMS you never use.

Two things decide the rest: how many gigabytes you need, which is an hour-by-hour calculation, and whether the network works where you live, which is a coverage and speed check you run yourself. If another operator wins, you can keep your number: the transfer takes a few minutes.