After a couple of months with Three PAYG, I've moved to Orange PAYG.
Three was fine, with a good, cheap service. However, I wasn't totally satisfied with their data rate. Coverage was good, but data still seemed sluggish. While it was marginally better than O2, and substantially cheaper, I still feel it's not as good as it could be. There's also something substantial missing from Three's PAYG offering: free WiFi. The lack of The Cloud or BT Openwhatever on Three is particularly noticeable. While I barely used it while on O2, there are several occasions where Three's coverage let me down and one of BT's nodes mocked me mercilessly sitting there with a strong signal in my iPhone's WiFi list.
Meanwhile, Orange and T-Mobile are doing the dirty in a new enterprise called "Everything Everywhere". It looks like the two nets will merge, and so data coverage should be second-to-none. In my opinion, Orange have always been the most technically competent UK network, and it's just their marketing and customer services I had a problem with.
Back then, I was really just using my phone as a phone, so there wasn't much technical reason to stick about; their poor CS was far more of a problem. Nowadays, I use my phone much more for data than for phoning, so data coverage and performance is more important: what's the point in having a smartphone to check facts in the pub if the net is so slow that it's closing time before Wikipedia starts to appear.
So, I was eager to give Orange another go. This time, it would be PAYG. However, if you remember from my last post on this subject, Orange was stupidly not offering PAYG SIMs to existing iPhone 4 users, even though Apple sold record numbers of unlocked handsets.
They finally got their act together earlier this month, and started selling iPhone 4 PAYG SIMs. I ordered one over the phone: £25, which was explained as £15 for the SIM, plus £10 top-up credit. A little excessive I feel, and I realised after ordering that I could have just ordered their standard £25/month rolling one-month SIM-only plan and got a better deal, switching to PAYG after the first month.
Anyway, the SIM arrived, and I promptly ordered my PAC code from Three, which arrived soon afterwards by text. I added £5 of credit just in case, and then called Orange on Monday and gave them the PAC code. I expected some form of confirmation via text or something, but... nothing.
I called back the next day and it turns out they hadn't submitted it. Ugh. This is, apparently, how it's going to go from now one. So, I gave them the code again. This time, they confirmed the port for Thursday: two days later. Fine. Whatever.
Now, credit. I paid for £10 of credit when I ordered the SIM. I also was expecting £10 extra for porting my number, and they said something about giving me £10 of extra credit per month if I topped up with £10... I'm not sure about that last bit, though. I was also, of course, expecting the promised free 250MB mobile data package. This was all confirmed to me when I gave the PAC code on Tuesday, and I was assured that the data package was on the account and the credit was coming.
Anyway, on Thursday throughout the porting transition, I was checking "Your Account" on Orange. My number had transferred, and yet my £5 of credit had dwindled to nothing even though I hadn't used it. It turned out that 900kb of mobile data had used it up! Hang on a sec... I thought I was getting free data?! I distinctly remember being told on Tuesday that my account had the 250MB free data package...
A shouty call to Orange, and I was assured this was a mistake. The billing team was notified, but I was told that they could not guarantee I'd be reimbursed for the erroneously-used credit. Oh well, it's only £5.
However, after this point I couldn't even call Orange because my account didn't have the requisite 25p to call them to tell them about their cock-ups. As I was expecting at least £20 of credit to appear any moment, I was loathe to top-up... for a start, I think I have to top-up every month to get the promised benefits, so I don't really want to build up excess credit that'll never get used.
I did, however, get a text to say the 250MB package had finally been added.
Friday: still no credit. A stern email to Orange demanding the £20 I was due plus the £5 their cock-up had wasted. I was forced to add £10 of credit manually, just so I could make a call.
Saturday: I've just got a text saying I've been credited £20. Still not right -- where's that £5, plus the 25p's I've been forking out to call Customer Services! -- but I have a feeling that's all I'm going to get out of them.
The problem here is that while the sales blurb says the account "comes with" free credit, free mobile data, etc., it all seems to be applied piecemeal with five-working-day turnarounds. The number port really confused things too. It's pathetic. They clearly treat their PAYG customers far worse than their Contract customers, especially with this insult of a 25p Customer Services charge, when I'm calling about their mistakes.
Orange CS is very polite, and their agents seem genuinely eager to help. However, they're stuck in a byzantine system of teams and systems and account details and scripts, and it just means things don't get fixed. I hark back to the olden days when a single twenty-something in Patchway (or Glasgow?) would be able to sort everything out after spending 30 seconds listening and comprehending the customer's problem. Now it's effectively a bunch of electronic note- and buck-passing between departments.
...I mean, even the fact that they couldn't offer SIMs to Apple unlocked-iPhone 4 customers on launch day or even for months afterwards shows how clueless they are. I still maintain that was a massive missed opportunity for the network to steal a slew of affluent but irritated O2 customers.
If it wasn't for the much-vaunted Orange network, I'd hightail straight back to Three right now, and sign up for a proper contract with them. I'm now going to use Orange for a few weeks and see how I get on. If it isn't as good as it's supposed to be, I'll be off. I know this isn't the biggest catastrophe in the world, but this kind of poor customer service just bugs the crap out of me.
A few years ago, I wrote about Orange and how they just weren't as good as they used to be. I was hoping after a few years in the wilderness, I'd be pleasantly surprised. I'm not. Their service seems worse than ever.
...
Anyway. The next thing stuck in my craw is international data. I'm off on holiday to WDW in November, and try as I may, I just can't find any economic or legit way to get two weeks of data access on either my iPad or my iPhone. I just want a bit of email and limited web access just so we can organise things. However, AT&T seem hellbent in NOT offering service to non-residents.
I could just roam with my new Orange account, but apparently that will cost more than the holiday. If I were paranoid, I'd suspect that the networks are colluding internationally to encourage their customers to give up and just fork out ~£5/MB.
I mean, how hard could it be to sell me an iPad micro-SIM with a month's prepaid credit? I've got a US passport and a good UK VISA credit card... what's the problem?
UPDATE (Tuesday): A woman from Orange called me yesterday to discuss the email I\'d sent to them.. she seemed very nice, but I was at a client so I had to ask her to call back. She\'s due to call back later today.
However, things have changed slightly. (WARNING: Long story follows)
On the way back from the client\'s site in Leicester, I fell asleep on the train to Birmingham. When we arrived, I woke up and left the train. Just before catching my connecting train home to Bristol, I realised that my bag was still on the Leicester train, which had just left Birmingham to return!
Fortunately, Birmingham New Street\'s exceptional customer service staff managed to phone ahead and get the backpack taken off the train at the nearest station. Of course this meant I would miss my connecting train, but with a £2k MacBook Pro and a £700 iPad in there, I was happy to stick around. A short trip out to Coleshill Parkway station, and I was happily reunited with my bag.
Back to Birmingham, and I just missed the Bristol train: it would have been a run from Platform 12 to Platform 3 in about 10 seconds, so that wasn\'t going to happen at the best of times. I waited for the next train, which had broken down. Virgin Trains, however, managed to cobble together a replacement which finally departed Brum half-an-hour late. Astonishingly, they managed to make up all that time and arrive at Bristol at 2300, four minutes early after all, and I\'m still wondering how the hell they managed that. From the look of the train progress on the National Rail app, they made twenty minutes of that up between Gloucester and Bristol Parkway, which is usually a fifty minute leg.
Even so, I was two hours late according to my original timetable, and knackered as hell after being up since 5am.
Why am I telling you this? Ah yes. During that whole time, my phone was unable to make outgoing calls. I could tweet, email, SMS, Skype, and even receive calls, but the critical - and some might say, characteristic - function of the phone, that of making telephone calls, wasn\'t working: it would just go beep-beep-beep at me. I couldn\'t even call Orange.
This was a bit of a problem, considering I needed to call my Dad who was going to give me a lift back from the station at nine!
I checked my credit using the website: £30. Nothing on the account details that looked suspicious. Fortunately, Dad had his mobile with him, and received my text asking him to call me. In the end, it wasn\'t actually a big problem.
However, it\'s given me something to talk to this woman about.
This morning the phone works just fine. Nothing\'s changed and no \"We\'ve messed with your phone. Please delete this message\" texts from Orange, but now it can make outgoing calls.
I am so close to porting back to Three.
UPDATE (Tuesday):
The woman from Orange called back. She was very nice, and sorted out a few things on my account, such as detaching my online accounts so I can access my balance, etc. correctly through the iPhone app. The app can only handle one plan per account, so I was only able to see my iPad package (useless). Of course, knowing Orange, I now have to wait 48 hours for the change to take effect... why does everything take days to activate on Orange? What computers are they using there?!
One little tidbit I gleaned: Orange\'s systems store your account password unencrypted, as she was able to see it. This is a password used to secure your credit card details. There\'s no good reason why it shouldn\'t be irreversibly hashed, allowing her to only change the password rather than view it. Anyway, I digress.
Finally, she passed me onto the CS team to talk about the credit erroneously used up, and the £3.57 refund that I was (by now) determined to get.
Once transferred, he proceeded to take me through each transaction on my account from the time I activated the SIM. Thanks to the 48 hour delay on removing my account from their Online account system, I was able to see the itemised log too.
So, to quickly recap: I bought the SIM on the 7th. It arrived on the 11th. I activated it on the 12th and added £5 credit, as the promised £10 wasn\'t there. I then called on the 13th (and then again on the 14th) to PAC in. On the 13th at 10:10, I was told that I had the Free Internet bundle on the account. Then on the 16th, the number port happened, and then £3.57 of credit disappeared due to GPRS (internet) usage, which I informed the guy was me trying to access the Orange homepage. I added another £10 on the 17th, and then finally got the £20 due to me on the 18th.
The SIM was sold to me on the 7th as having £10 of top-up, and \"Each pay as you go micro SIM comes with 250MB UK mobile internet browsing\" (their words).
The CS guy repeatedly tried to explain to me that while I had the free Internet package, as I hadn\'t activated it through the Orange Homepage, the GPRS usage was charged.
I repeatedly told him that nothing had told me that I had to jump through that particular hoop, and as I was told by one of his colleagues three days earlier that I had the package on the account, I can\'t see why I should have thought any different.
The call became more and more heated, until finally I said that as the website says the SIM \"comes with\" mobile internet browsing and clearly doesn\'t \"come with\" any such thing (and no instructions, mind), that this was basically a LIE.
He said it comes down to Orange policy. I was charged for internet usage when I\'d already been told I had free Internet, and somehow the correctness of this was in dispute! I said that I understood it was policy, and I realised he couldn\'t do anything about it, but he should admit that it\'s a stupid policy. He didn\'t answer that, though.
What tickles me is this call was about just £3.57, and it was £3.57 of pretend money: GPRS usage by me that Orange was already accounting for. Not a premium call or anything that Orange would actually have to pay a third-party for. So why was it like getting blood out of a stone? He finally credited me exactly £3.57 with an exasperated sigh. I didn\'t even bother bringing up the numerous 25p\'s I\'ve spent calling them.
Then we talk about the £20 of credit. He explained that the £10 number porting reward comes after 3-5 working days. Fine. Not a problem. Doesn\'t explain why the £10 I paid on the 7th wasn\'t credited until the 18th, though. Oh, that\'s because it only takes effect 3-5 working days after the SIM is activated. Um, why? This initial credit is exactly for the purpose of getting going on the account, so shouldn\'t it be there by default? Why isn\'t is tied to the SIM itself? No matter... I can concede that one, but there\'s no reason why it should appear immediately when the SIM is activated. I talked at length to Orange CS on the 13th, and there\'s no fundamental reason why it couldn\'t have been activated on that SIM immediately.
This \"3-5 working days\" thing is bollocks, quite frankly. There\'s just no call for it. Are these requests being printed out and posted between different departments in the UK and India?
Finally, we talk about the fact that my phone couldn\'t make calls last night. Firstly, he blamed it on network coverage. I pointed out that - as I\'d explained to him not thirty seconds before - I was able to receive calls, send texts and use the internet. Secondly, he started talking about my phone having settings changed by SIM updates. I cut him off and said that I had no SIM updates yesterday or today, and it didn\'t work yesterday but does work today. Then, \"network fault\". I said that this was over (at least) a three hour period in an area approximately 80 miles in diameter, and seemed to affect only my phone.
He fell back to the fact that he didn\'t have my most recent account details: it takes a good 48 hours for all the account activity to appear on the system. Ridiculous.
Anyway, I\'m not sure what to take from this. I\'ve allegedly got everything I want now, although I\'m not holding out much hope for the future credits promised to me (eg. the data package renewal next month). I\'m also not convinced my phone will work when I need it to.
I\'m not going to immediately move back to Three, as I\'m still hopeful that Orange\'s network (as opposed to their customer service) makes this worthwhile. Even though I couldn\'t make any calls (!), my trip from Bristol to Leicester via Birmingham (a few times) and back was well-covered by the Orange network, and data performance was good.
I\'m not convinced that any of this will be taken seriously by Orange if I were to email them. I\'m thinking of writing a letter, though.
Bitching about it on the internet is more fun. What I do hope is that anyone searching for \"Orange PAYG iPhone SIM-only\" or anything like that will see this post, and take care to double-check everything with Orange CS.
Message to Orange: get someone senior to sit with a few people like me and just listen. Don\'t try to explain the problems individually: just try to absorb and understand the bigger picture. I\'m sure you\'ll identify some institutional and procedural problems that\'ll solve this kind of shit once and for all. This has nothing to do with accounts or networks or phones. It has to do with a ridiculously bureaucratic mess. The kind of mess that in the olden days was the very thing Orange was set up to compete against. This can be fixed, but it\'ll need an institutional change of mindset. Take the opportunity with Everything Everywhere to reanalyse how these kinds of problems are handled.
Three have successfully implemented the old Orange / Hutchinson customer service ethos, even while using heavy outsourcing to India... I certainly don\'t want this seen as an \"Indian outsourcing\" problem, as it\'s clear that it can be done well. However, the silly responses I\'ve had on these issues from Orange reek of the nasty but unfortunately apt Indian Call Centre stereotype.
Right now, my dream network is:
* O2\'s packages and computer system
* Three\'s customer service
* Orange\'s network.
Match that, and you\'re onto a winner. See if there are synergies with T-Mobile to achieve that.
And get rid of all the stupid animal packages. They\'re just confusing.
Useful post as I\'m just about to get an iphone !... a toss up between orange and 3.
I might start with 3 and see what happens !
Cheers for posting this
I have just ported from Orange to 3. All in one £15 payg per month.
300mins, 3,000 texts and unlimited (and yes it is truly unlimited) internet.
No other providers are offering unlimited internet. And I am getting 3.5 or HSPA signal almost everywhere.
And with a few adjustments, I can even use the sim in my 3 dongle on my pc even though they think they have set it so you can\'t. You can!
Hello 3.
And no, I don\'t work for them and still waiting for the port to complete. 24hrs now, my orange sim has been switched off, so awaiting 3 to finish the job tonight, and credit me £10 for doing so.
Cheers
Dave