Minxy
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- Aug 22, 2007
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- Since 1996, had Elddis/Swift/Rapido/Rimor/Chausson MHs. Autocruise/Globecar PVCs/Compactline i-138
Who am I talking about? Three!!!!
Someone on another thread has asked about issues he's having with his Smarty sim, which uses Three, so I thought I'd post this thread.
Over the last few weeks we've had horrendous problems with the Three mobile phone network (hubby is on Three and I'm on ID (who use Three), this has been getting worse and has now culminated in not being able to get a usable signal for the vast majority of the time and even if we can it is very, very slow and drops out. As I have a dual sim phone I used my PAYG RWG sim (on O2) to get on the internet, albeit quite carefully and only for stuff I really needed to do as once I'd used my free 250mb allowance I started to eat into my £ credit at a fair old rate so I was far from happy so about 2 weeks ago I had an on-line chat with ID and after I complained about it being slow and not really usable - having to wait for 2 minutes for a web page to load, if it did at all, was far from ideal - they credited my account with £20 to make up for the bad service which I was told should improve. Unfortunately it went seriously down the pan within 2 days and became virtually unusable - I couldn't get on the forum a lot of the time!
As a consequence I’d well and truly had enough, never mind how peed off hubby was, so after a lot of messing about managed to use my ID sim to have another chat with ID (it dropped out at least 4 times whilst I was doing so) and told them how unhappy I was and was asked to provide info to the chat agent and do some stuff to see if it improved the signal, one of which was to remove the sim, give it a wipe, and put it back in the phone … the same phone I was using to chat on!
Despite telling her I couldn't I was told I 'had' to cooperate so she could try to resolve it totally missing the point that I could NOT retrieve the sim whilst I was using the flipping phone! It took a while but she finally realised she was on to a hiding to nothing by insisting especially since I'd told her that I'd swapped it from my old phone to new one a few days earlier and made sure it was 'clean' and that both me and hubby with his Three sim were having the same issues so I knew it was not the sim anyway. Eventually I asked what my options were about getting out the contract so I could go elsewhere which was duly logged and I was told that I would get a call from the complaints team within 48 hours … yeah … of course I will! She wasn't the best chat person I've dealt with and cut me off very quickly once she'd logged the complaint so I wasn't best pleased either.
Well, believe it or not I did get a call within 2 days (Thursday) by a UK based chap who listened to all the problems, what we'd tried to improve it, and how pretty much unusable it was now - I even relayed the issues we'd had a few years ago with Three who cut us off for 3 days (no calls, texts, or date … nowt!) but that we'd decided to give them (Three) another go as we thought they'd have improved by now. He was apologetic and understood totally how unsatisfactory it was but in order to pass the info to Three they had to follow a set procedure which meant the first thing to try was a replacement sim, even though he realised that this is unlikely to sort the issue out due to hubby also having the same problem. In addition he told me that there is some planned maintenance/repair work being undertaken on masts near us which could be what's causing the problems, work to improve the service and install 5G! I told him I was quite happy to stay with ID if they could give me a usable service but that I knew it wasn't them who were causing the problems and appreciated it was down to Three not providing the service so was out of ID's hands. Unfortunately there was nothing that could be done until the sim had been replaced and tried as that is what starts the ball rolling … he therefore requested a new sim be sent to me and it arrived this afternoon so I'm now waiting for it to be 'activated' by ID/Three then I can do some testing, the results of which are needed so the complaint can be triggered with Three.
Due to the worsening issues over the last week we've got a couple of 40gb 30 day 'no contract' Talkmobile sims (half price for 3 months @ £4.95) that use Vodafone's network in order to get online, these came yesterday afternoon and we've been trying to catch up on all the internet etc stuff we hadn't been able to do beforehand so have been a bit busy! What's interesting is that I've since discovered using Talkmobile's site that the 2 masts closest to us are having maintenance done and wonder if these are the same ones that Three uses … if so it could explain the issue with Three. What is daft though is the sheer madness to do work on them at the same time as it's surely obvious it could cause a limited service from them and if they are not usable at times we will then be having to 'link' to masts further away which will already be used by others and thus reduce the usable signal for everyone. The work on one of these masts is due to be done by the end of the month by Vodafone and the other a week later but at least we are able to use our Talkmobile sims which is more than I can say for ID/Three.
If ID/Three can't sort it, or give me a guarantee that the problems will be resolved soon, then I'll be looking to cancel my contract without any repercussions and stick with Talkmobile (EU roaming is permitted) for the time being whilst I decide whether to stick with them or look elsewhere. (The daft thing is that we were with Vodafone before and only changed to Three/ID because of their new roaming policy (ie £2 a day), but this isn't the case with Talkmobile who still allow roaming!)

Over the last few weeks we've had horrendous problems with the Three mobile phone network (hubby is on Three and I'm on ID (who use Three), this has been getting worse and has now culminated in not being able to get a usable signal for the vast majority of the time and even if we can it is very, very slow and drops out. As I have a dual sim phone I used my PAYG RWG sim (on O2) to get on the internet, albeit quite carefully and only for stuff I really needed to do as once I'd used my free 250mb allowance I started to eat into my £ credit at a fair old rate so I was far from happy so about 2 weeks ago I had an on-line chat with ID and after I complained about it being slow and not really usable - having to wait for 2 minutes for a web page to load, if it did at all, was far from ideal - they credited my account with £20 to make up for the bad service which I was told should improve. Unfortunately it went seriously down the pan within 2 days and became virtually unusable - I couldn't get on the forum a lot of the time!

As a consequence I’d well and truly had enough, never mind how peed off hubby was, so after a lot of messing about managed to use my ID sim to have another chat with ID (it dropped out at least 4 times whilst I was doing so) and told them how unhappy I was and was asked to provide info to the chat agent and do some stuff to see if it improved the signal, one of which was to remove the sim, give it a wipe, and put it back in the phone … the same phone I was using to chat on!

Well, believe it or not I did get a call within 2 days (Thursday) by a UK based chap who listened to all the problems, what we'd tried to improve it, and how pretty much unusable it was now - I even relayed the issues we'd had a few years ago with Three who cut us off for 3 days (no calls, texts, or date … nowt!) but that we'd decided to give them (Three) another go as we thought they'd have improved by now. He was apologetic and understood totally how unsatisfactory it was but in order to pass the info to Three they had to follow a set procedure which meant the first thing to try was a replacement sim, even though he realised that this is unlikely to sort the issue out due to hubby also having the same problem. In addition he told me that there is some planned maintenance/repair work being undertaken on masts near us which could be what's causing the problems, work to improve the service and install 5G! I told him I was quite happy to stay with ID if they could give me a usable service but that I knew it wasn't them who were causing the problems and appreciated it was down to Three not providing the service so was out of ID's hands. Unfortunately there was nothing that could be done until the sim had been replaced and tried as that is what starts the ball rolling … he therefore requested a new sim be sent to me and it arrived this afternoon so I'm now waiting for it to be 'activated' by ID/Three then I can do some testing, the results of which are needed so the complaint can be triggered with Three.
Due to the worsening issues over the last week we've got a couple of 40gb 30 day 'no contract' Talkmobile sims (half price for 3 months @ £4.95) that use Vodafone's network in order to get online, these came yesterday afternoon and we've been trying to catch up on all the internet etc stuff we hadn't been able to do beforehand so have been a bit busy! What's interesting is that I've since discovered using Talkmobile's site that the 2 masts closest to us are having maintenance done and wonder if these are the same ones that Three uses … if so it could explain the issue with Three. What is daft though is the sheer madness to do work on them at the same time as it's surely obvious it could cause a limited service from them and if they are not usable at times we will then be having to 'link' to masts further away which will already be used by others and thus reduce the usable signal for everyone. The work on one of these masts is due to be done by the end of the month by Vodafone and the other a week later but at least we are able to use our Talkmobile sims which is more than I can say for ID/Three.
If ID/Three can't sort it, or give me a guarantee that the problems will be resolved soon, then I'll be looking to cancel my contract without any repercussions and stick with Talkmobile (EU roaming is permitted) for the time being whilst I decide whether to stick with them or look elsewhere. (The daft thing is that we were with Vodafone before and only changed to Three/ID because of their new roaming policy (ie £2 a day), but this isn't the case with Talkmobile who still allow roaming!)