
Can you do the same for Apple patent stories?
Cut-price operator GiffGaff had another minor network outage last week, this time knocking out text messaging for some customers. Meanwhile, here in the Vulture Towers, debate raged as to whether this qualifies as news - given how often GiffGaff falls apart - so we thought we'd put it to a popular vote so you can tell us. We …
"do punters really buy this?"
Are you mental? Have you seen their prices? Damn right punters buy this! I was planning to get onto giffgaff myself when my 3 contract runs out later this month. But if they're having lots of problems, I probably won't be looking at them after all, which is why I'm glad that this article came out when it did.
So please ignore bill 36, and do not hesitate to publish this sort of story.
The problem is, the "unlimited" (as long as it's not tethered, on too large a screen, in a non-phone-call-capable device, wrong phase of the moon...) offering is a short-sighted and damaging loss-leader. They're paying O2 by the megabyte, so anyone using much over a gigabyte each month on those plans is losing GG money. I like the idea of unlimited tariffs, but when it's structured this way it's just not sustainable.
They delayed the problem a bit by slapping the 1Gb limit on £10 - but I can't imagine the £12 "unlimited" loss-leader holding up for long, particularly since most of the users can happily stay on £10: the £12 figures will look even worse as it collects only the heaviest of the £10 bag's users.
Personally, Three's £6.90 tariff is a much better deal: I don't tether or do serious downloading on my mobile handset - I have a 3G tablet, WiFi at home and work, so 500 Mb on the phone is plenty. (A £5 'gigabag' gets me that data, but forces me onto PAYG rates for calls+texts.) The lousy reliability record lately is pretty much the last straw - and of course their screwed up "adult content filter" irritated me severely for the day or two it took them to get it disabled on my account after imposing it without my consent.
People want it because it's cheap. £10 a month covers all my phone and data usage. You can set the goodybag to automatic and auto top up for your credit, so it becomes like having a contact with no minimum term and no notice period.
The network is quite unreliable and the website extremely unreliable but it works well enough for the money I pay. It helps if you have a few people you contact regularly using the service as it costs you nothing to call or text them. It's a great network for groups of kids, if they all get their friends to join each one gets £5 credit and they only have to top up £5 every three months to talk to each other for free.
Cheap. Occasionally unreliable, though a lot of that is technical debt from O2.
£10 a month gets me unlimited texts, unlimited calls to GiffGaff, good lot of minutes, and (previously unlimited but now capped to a few GB) data.
Roll it over, like a contract without those pesky credit checks or tie in for 18 months etc.
Only thing is, they expressly forbid tethering, so can't really use the mobile as a 3G modem.
For low mobile usage people it's easily the best deal around. I pay an average of £4 a month and get unlimited texts and calls to the people I actually text or call. If you joined up a couple of years ago there was over a year of free unlimited internet (whilst they negotiated pricing with O2)!
"they expressly forbid tethering"
I don't use GiffGaff but this is only partly accurate. They do indeed expressly forbid tethering on their £10/month package, but they have other packages on which they do allow tethering (their data-only 'gigabags' starting at £5 for 500MB lasting one month).
Thankfully The Reg is very vocal in keeping us up-to-date about issues that my wife and I never seem to notice so we know that GiffGaff is rubbish and we should really go somewhere else. From our own usage however it seems to be just fine and the prices remain unbeaten so I suspect we'll hang in there just a little bit longer.
Having been with them for about 18 months now, I have nothing but praise for them. Sure, they have their problems, but what operator doesn't? At least they say that they're having them, and keep users 'in the loop' wherever they can. The flexibility, the free calls to other GiffGaff numbers, truly massive internet quotas for virtually nothing - it works for me. As a business user I'm confident enought to use GiffGaff in my daily work.
the problem is an issue happens every 3 months that takes some times an month to fix or requires an ask an Agent to get them to fix it {these are things that should be fixed auto}(I would Strongly not recommend Giffgaff as an Main phone and even more so if its for important calls or business use),
The new issue is there payment system is now taking money Twice when you have recurring goodybags enabled when it should only be taking it once, happy they have brought back Qued goodybags again as that system was Working perfectly fine before they removed it last time
i use giffgaff on my second phone for the unlimited internet for £12 works perfectly fine for that (mainly why most of the issues they have had have happened to Voice and text)
giffgaff Need to Dump Lithium as its likely where most of there issues are coming from, they need sack who ever is managing the database and back end stuff (like goodybags, top-ups, card details) you cant screw with users money they just leave
Have been using GG for about 2 years for a personal iPhone (not work phone.) Its a great way of getting a cheap data plan on a second phone and for weekend use, but i wouldn't be relying on it for business/work or anything critical as it does seem a bit fragile.
However if i was a teenager/student/mum/older person needing bargain data on an unlocked or out-of-contract phone i'd be over the moon with it.
So, unbeatable value and the community aspect ensures that the (not infrequent) problems are very transparent. You pays your money etc etc....
This did actually get me thinking....
Given the number of stories you do post about various things tripping up, falling over, going down and generally blowing up with an earth shattering kaboom, why not just pull together a single unified page detailing current popular sites or services that are down and have it in a central place that everyone can get to? That way us little guys can see that Vodafone's billing page is being rebuilt, Amazon's datacentre has a cold and isn't coming out to play and Giff-Gaff are being, well.... Giff-Gaff again.
I dunno, maybe it's a daft idea....
The question here is, if you stop reporting every detail, is it going to make any big difference to the site? Are the resources and people that have been freed up from following GiffGaff going to bring us anything more interesting? If yes, then maybe you should stop following issues with GiffGaff.
If the answer is no and we are just looking at not annoying the people who don't care about GiffGaff, then carry on reporting every little detail you feel like reporting - anyone that doesn't want to read about it just shouldn't read about it. Just make the headlines clear so they're easy to avoid.
In fact, do you not monitor the clicks each article gets and focus on the popular stuff anyway? Should that not give you the answer?
I have been with GiffGaff for a couple of years and only ever had the one big problem when O2 fell over, taking GiffGaff (and other) with it.
I have converted all my family over ( have 2 daughters and it's saved me an absolute fortune) and thanks to telling family and friends and recruiting them, I have earned myself quite a lot of "payback" which has given me many months of effectively free service :)
I guess if both sender and receiver have iPhones it just defaults to iMessage over the data network. I cant say that my girlfriend or I saw any interruption to our sexting on Thursday.
I like GiffGaff and can get by without comms for a day or 2. Their infrastructure will get more robust with every failure (hopefully).
Worrying about giffgaffs far from stellar reliability seems redundant while they live on O2's appalling network. Only place I can rely on O2 coverage is at home, where I don't need it. Head to the city and even where I find a full signal there's no data throughput and barely intelligible voice quality, too much time there's just no signal. Head to the county and I might as well leave the phone at home.
giffgaff are amateurs but O2 are professional screwups. Great combination unless you need your phone.
No problems with GiffGaff here, as a primarily data and SMS user, they give me the service I want at a price I'm prepared to pay.
I just wish O2 would sort out their coverage in my office so I can get a decent signal at work.
It's a brand new building, in the heart of the City of London, and nobody thought to ensure that the office space had a decent mobile signal.
It might be something to do with the stupid architectural design and pointless metalwork, the only plus point of working inside the building is that I don't have to look at it!
I was using GiffGaff fine until last month, when their 3G dropped on a Friday and wasn't resolved until Monday afternoon. Throughout the weekend, the thread on this unfortunate mishap kept being resolved, only to be reopened hours later when fixes they were putting in simply didn't work.
I have since jumped ship and gone with Tesco.