So much rightness, right here.
Yup. Cheap as chips. The network still trips over its own arse occasionally, but Iāll take that in exchange for no contract & decent prices. Plus, I made a nice fifty quid just before my birthday #& again at Xmas last year ordering SIMs for friends & family.
Orange are evil. They sold me a SIM contract claiming it would work in my house. When I got it home, the signal was so poor I phoned to cancel, but they told me that I would have to pay a ācancellation feeā equivalent to a full year of service in order to terminate the contract.
When I refused to pay I got the full set of legal threats, which only stopped when I challenged them to take me to court. Iām pretty sure they play a numbers game, presuming, probably correctly, that many people will cave in.
What happened, Orange? You used to be cool. Now youāre weird, and itās not cool to be weird.
Well Iād definitely report the cockwombles to OFCOM at very least but yeah, love the idea of reporting their own spam to their spam line.
Its only going to take 4 days for me, maybe theyāve already realised how horrible they were being?
Iāve yet to receive similar texts from sister network T-Mobile but theyāve pissed me off enough that Iām planning to leave anyway. Three are top of my list so far but Giffgaff seem to be pretty decent.
All these mentions of how inexpensive data plans are in the UK make me sad. In the US, you pay maximum dollar for minimum service, and it totally sucks.
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I ran across something like this recently when I watched a friend play Zoo Tycoon on XBox. In the game, you can place tables with sun umbrellas for your zoo guests to enjoy. Remember, this is not a free game, you pay $50 to $60 dollars for it (at least it was a few weeks ago). As he started placing sun shades, we noticed that the umbrellas all had really annoying Chef Boyardee logos on the tops of the umbrellas. So now he literally canāt look at the zoo heās built without seeing that logo everywhere. We both wrote the company and told them that, if anything, paying to advertise inside a game he paid for just made us want to avoid their brand completely.
Orange/EE are one of the worst companies for unwanted anything. Whether it be texts, charges, or telemarketer calls, they have it all.
Customer service is lousy and their coverage isnāt great either. Furthermore, the rollout of 4G has meant they have modified their existing masts somehow and the signal quality in 2/3G is worse as a result.
Take a look at the EE forums. A lot of people complaining on there and I know for a fact that EE pays almost no attention to them because they often reward the most anti-EE people at random with vouchers and the like.
I think youāre better off with any other carrier, to be honest.
That is an excellent rule to go by.
However, as itās Orange werāre talking about here: what ethics?
Itās called āmanaging customer expectationsā; tell the rubes somethingāll take forever, then when itās only half as terribad as they intimated, you feel better.
Yes! Clearly itās the customerās fault!
or
Letās not waste time and money on making a better product, letās just find stupider customers!
The invisible hand of the market at work!
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Fifteen quid a month; 450 mins, unlimited text, unlimited data. THANKS, OBAMA! (sorry 
)
Ok, now Iām just getting mad. I bet your handset is way better, too. >_<
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Cory, you defintitely want to consider shifting to The Co-operative Phone and Broadband. I am a very happy customer. As cheap as any of the big ones and no sleazy marketing shite.
See my post previously; get one straight from China. chinavasion.com is where Iāvce bought phones the last few years. Well good.
Not sure what I should do apropos of any āgreat brandsā who pay Orange to spam me in the runup to Christmas: maybe just name-and-shame them here?
DO IT
Thatād be great. Anybody know of any US carriers that will accept a region-free or unlocked phone? (Honestly not sure such a thing exists in the US right now.)
I think that most or all of the GSM-family carriers in the US will accept most anything (though the details of exactly what data rates and things will or wonāt work based on frequencies supported can be a bit alphabet-soup at times); but they may charge you exactly the same as if you were receiving a handset subsidy.
Verizon is notoriously nasty about non-blessed devices; and only a minority of devices on their network even have a user-swappable SIM (or equivalent, the semi-convergence of the GSM and CDMA camps in LTE-land gets pretty baffling) that lets you try, rather than having to call the carrier for provisioning and get shot down. Iām not sure about Sprint. Architecturally, they are in the VZ camp; but they are smaller and hungrier, and might be more reasonable.
(One note, from personal experience: Tracphone is a fairly good deal if you just need a super-minimal number of minutes, want to keep a phone number, and need the portability of a cell (so, say, porting it to a SIP provider isnāt an option); but their āSIM cardsā, despite looking like they should, donāt work in any non-tracphone handset, nor do non-tracphone SIMs work in their handsets. I donāt know the details of how the locking is done, or whether anybody has hacked around it; but donāt expect it to just work, because it wonāt.)
