Vodafone gives away internet over Christmas Vodafone UK is giving away internet access between Christmas and the new year, but only to those who have their APN set correctly. The promotional offer is an extension of the operator's free Fridays, and runs from Christmas morning until January 1st. But because it's aimed at those using the internet through a mobile phone, …
Given the utter mess that's Vodafone's billing and online "portal", will anyone really notice? Their online account site is broken for all of our 4 contract phones (it never worked) and neither my wife or I have had a correct bill in the 4+ months since we ported to Vodafone (almost all massive overcharging for very small amounts (just a few MBs) of what should be 500 MB included internet access).
Still, at least the contract phones are better than our two prepay Vodafone SIMs, which refuse to register or show ANY GPRS/3G data service at all (no matter what the APN).... or their shops, which advise the only way to fix the problem MIGHT be to buy another SIM.
Still, at least my bill looks vaguely correct this month, though no sign of the refund I was promised....and we can enjoy the 3G voice coverage we paid £160 for a home gateway to provide.
Orange, I forgive you.... You may have been a bunch of tw*ts, but at lest the phone worked 351 days of the year and the bill was correct 90% of the time.
I signed up for a free HTC Magic in May, on a £35/month contract with unlimited internet and texts and several hundred minutes. Since October I've been battling with Voda to get them to fix my account which has been billed between £50 and £65 per month since I got the phone.
Last month after a ranty phone call I was told I'd get a letter confirming the refunds due & the reasons for the cock-up, and the money refunded to my account. Yesterday I received my Voda bill.... £63 and no credits.
After more phone-calls and more ranting, I have now got an email confirming I'll get £154 refunded and an explanation for the problem (somebody, apparently, forgot to add the code for the unlimited internet and SMSes (so I've been charged for all my texts and web usage since May).
We'll see whether the money ever actually crops up. Absolutely hopeless though, and incredibly unhelpful even when they admit the problem is their own.
The WAP stuff doesn't use Navarro transcoding kit. Only VF live stuff goes via this.
The WAP APN like the internet APN on VF UK goes via 724 solutions web optimisers. These boxes work by reading the HTTP user agent string to modify the traffic/code as appropriate to reduce traffic volume.
@ Pandy06269 the HTC Magic is sent to the WAP gateway for a number of device customised reasons (ie Android Marketplace connectivity).
Given that PAYG Internet on their USB dongles is cheaper than the rate that they charge for their mobiles (it's why I bought a separate USB dongle instead of just tethering my phone), it seems odd that they also need to feed ads to mobile users, but not dongle users...
But anyway, surely modifying and distributing a derivative work of someone else's content is a violation of copyright? Sure, as a customer, you consent to viewing vodafone's adverts. But if I'm a website owner, at no point have I given permission for vodafone to distribute modified versions of my page, surely?
sorted their act out when I threatened to leave and take them to court for being so completely useless.
I was on their "old" billing system with unlimited texts and picture messages, but their old system couldn't cope with the "unlimited" mobile internet bundle (unlimited in this case meaning 500MB). So every month for 10 months I was being charged the off-plan rate for internet use, and then having to get my bill adjusted (and getting them to waive the non-DD payment fee since I had no faith in their billing). When they realised this was the case they said I still had to pay for the usage - even though I'd used it in good faith.
After the threatening letter, I was moved to the "new" billing system (and therefore a different tariff) - but the new system can't cope with bundled MMS messages.
In some ways they're a total bunch of clowns, in others they're much better than other networks (unless hell freezes over I'm never touching Orange again!).
Anyway, the WAP gateway is hopeless - didn't work for A-GPS on my N95 so swapped to the Internet gateway, and have got my Xperia X1 on the Internet gateway from day 2 of having it since the WAP gateway was still so very, very slow and rubbish!
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