Three 3G? Don’t do what I did!

April 11, 2009 by Mike · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Mobile Broadband 
Three 3G only £1,024 per Gigabyte

Three 3G only £1,024 per Gigabyte

No T-Mobile coverage today so I decided to activate my Three 3G PAYG service. Plugged it in, connected it up and as expected no websites are available except the Three website itself, where you can pay your ten pounds and get a months worth of internet access, or so I thought.

I hadn’t registered a card with Three, but no worries – it said the first time you do so a ten pound charge would be applied to the account which could then be converted into a 1 month mobile broadband service, and so I paid up.

The thank you screen included a link to click to convert the purchase into broadband but when I did so the internet services all sprung into life before I was able to convert my purchase into broadband, and I was being charged an unbelievable £1 per MEGABYTE – thats £1,024 per Gigabyte.  This is totally unfair and totally out of order Three.

So after 30 seconds of retrying I was clearly on the verge of spending all my credit. It had cost me something betweem 94p and £1.46 (their website contradicted iteslf) to discover I no longer had enough credit to convert my £10 to broadband, and so the only option was to pull the 3G connection before it spent all my money.  I couldn’t go back to pay more as they need 7 days to re-use the newly registered card.

Normally I praise Three for their network coverage and 3G speed especially where other providers fail.  But this time I am absolutely disgusted with forcing me to waste ten quid – so please be warned – don’t try this at home!  And to rub salt into the wound, T-Mobile works perfectly here in Northwich after all.

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Just like T-Mobile but better

November 6, 2008 by admin · 2 Comments
Filed under: Mobile Broadband 

Well I have had a lovely day yesterday playing with my new iPhone and felt the urge to review all my old tech stuff, so taking a look at my T-Mobile mobile broadband invoice at £44 flat rate for unlimited throughput, (which actually means 10Gb per month according to the small print), and comparing it to their current pricing of £30 per month I decided to shop around for a better broadband package.

There are some great deals on the market, but there’s always some small print.  Amidst terrifying tales of paying £6 per megabyte for data access out of contract, which would value my 10Gb package at something in the region of £6,144 per month at this rate, there are also plenty of complaints on the internet that even with a contract there can be a nasty surprise if you over run the bundled bandwidth, for instance Three charge 10p per megabyte which equals £102.40 per gigabyte.  Few suppliers actually offer high volume contracts – it boiled down to T-Mobile unlimited again at £30.00 per month, Three at £30.00 for 15Gb or O2 with 10Gb for £35.00.  Three I already have as a backup and it is quite slow in places.  T-Mobile and O2 both offer free wifi access in the UK too, so I decided to renew the contract with T-Mobile where there is no risk of a huge additional bill at the end of the month.

They offered a fiver discount to keep the old modem, but studying the small print showed that their current model was in theory much faster.  It arrived this morning, only 15 hours after ordering it, worked perfectly for an hour and then blue screened my brand new computer when I removed it for the first time.  Not a good start.  But the saving grace is that the speeds I am getting today are spectacular.  I can upload at am amazing1,600 kbps and download about 450 which is not so good but still quite fast.

Naturally for lite users there are some much cheaper packages around – theres nothing wrong with a tenner a month for a 1Gb pay as you go package from Three but like I said the other day, I can use this up in a few hours.  Where?  Well for a start I back up all my files and photos online at iDrive, and thats a huge overhead.  Software upgrades and connections to remote desktops account for other big chunks and the occasional massive email attachment or two every day can also play havoc.  World of Warcraft takes the biscuit though. They have released a patch this week which is stretching the limits – why?  Its not just that it is 1.8 Gigabytes, but while downloading it also uploads to other computers without telling you.  Potentially I could use all 10Gb by leaving this on all night – but what about those who only have a 1Gb package in the first place, or pay up to 200 pounds extra.

This really does need to be sorted out – it is absolutely unfair that people end up bankrupt after some software they never heard of supplied gigabytes of uploads while they were asleep.

Now back to T-Mobile, if only the software was better (although its actually the modem drives which are causing it) – my network icon has been removed and is greyed out when I try to restore it – then this would be one excellent upgrade while saving £14.00 per month into the bargain.

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