I’m unhappy with my mobile provider so just called for my pac. Obviously, they’ve done their best to retain me.

They’re offering 5g of 4g data where moving across to someone new, the best I get for the price is 2g of 4g. Most of the issues have been from friends and family, when it works and I don’t have to bother with them, they’re like anyone else.

However, rather than this specific case, generally, how do you decide? I’ve often been accused of being too principled before.

Discuss…

These discounts they give for people wanting to leave are factored in to the prices everyone pays, so they’re not being generous – they’re just following their own rules in a calculated play to reduce churn.

These companies are all shite to someone because they are all competing on price. You only get great service with premium companies. In fact, it’s in their interests to give worse service to the people who are cost sensitive so they get cheaper service, but also tempt the people who can afford it onto premium service or offerings.

In short – principles? What principles would you be violating if you took the retainer deal? They are all basically the same playing the same game.

Most of the issues have been from friends and family, when it works and I don’t have to bother with them, they’re like anyone else

I don’t understand this bit

I’m not sure that any mobile provider is genuinely great, so changing may not solve everything anyway

I do hate voda though

Most of the issues have been from friends and family, when it works and I don’t have to bother with them, they’re like anyone else.

I’m really not sure I understand the point here. If I do you’re saying you’ve not had trouble but your friends and family have, that suggests it’s coverage?

It really does depend on the kind of issues you’ve had, if it’s coverage being terrible on a regular basis that would be a reason (probably the only one) I’d change, it would also mean being sure any new carrier doesn’t mast or band share with my current provider or simply resell my existing network.

Any other problems I’d be asking my self “will a new carrier be better” and I’d [personally] be answering “No, they’re all a shower”.

Bear in mind even On One/PX has awesome customer service if you never need to use it.

I’d be careful ‘fighting the good fight’ based on other peoples experience – it’s human nature for people to exaggerate problems when they’re venting, partly because we want to tell interesting stories and partly because we don’t want to seem we’re moaning about nothing. It’ll also be a one-sided argument.

If you have specific issues with Voda, leave but in my limited experience most providers are equally reliable now, you have about an equal chance of getting a decent signal (some work better in some places than others) and it’s as likely to get good or poor service out of them as any other.

The ‘threaten to leave for a better deal’ game is now pretty much standard operating procedure for a lot of people – nothing wrong with it.

It is Vodafone. They’ve ballsed up the wife’s bill so she left. Sister in law left and due to an admin error, they sent debt collectors after her. They’d somehow got two account for her but only closed one.

The signal is poor at home so has to piggyback off our broadband and broadband isn’t fast anyway.

How much data do you use? If your average usage is 1Gb, it doesn’t matter if they’re offering 5 or 500.

If the data is really important then consider staying…..

But, I vowed never to go back to Vodafone for various reasons. The main ones being:

– they got my bill wrong every month for 12 months, adding various add-on packs that I hadn’t asked for. It was always something different & every time I rang up, they immediately removed it, apologised & told me it wouldn’t happen again. I reckon they had a flag on my account that said ‘dick about with this bloke’s bill’.

– they let someone access my account, upgrade my contract & phone & change my address. Obviously, the new phone got delivered to the new address. Only thing I knew about it was when they called met to check that my new premium tariff was working out for me.
They then pretty much accused me of lying about not changing it, added extra levels of security to my account that they then never requested when I rang while trying to get all this resolved & then refused to put me back on my previous tariff….so I handed my 30day notice in…..only on the last day of my contract did someone ring with anything approaching a suitable ‘sweetener’ deal to make me stay with them, so I told him to get bent. I think I actually said I’d rather stick wasps up my ass than stay with Vodafone.

they let someone access my account, upgrade my contract & phone & change my address. Obviously, the new phone got delivered to the new address. Only thing I knew about it was when they called met to check that my new premium tariff was working out for me.

Similar thing happened to my wife, except she detected the new data limits and rang to complain. Took a month to sort out.

Then the following month they billed her £720 for the new Iphone she didn’t receive.

Now she is waiting for the new 18 month contract they claim she agreed to with her new iPhone to be taken off her account so she can leave.

It’s always worth being with someone else than Vodafone. They are a new level of crap.

Vodafone data backbone is poor, as far as I can tell – even when you get good signal it’s slow.

So in that case I’ll retract – no matter how much free data you get, their network will still be slow and annoying.

I use 1g each month but have to be careful towards the end of the month. Not so much that I suffer unduly but I could easily use more. Think I’d struggle to use 5 though.

Think it might be time to try another network.

Incidentally, they’ve still not sent the pac I requested.

In short – principles? What principles would you be violating if you took the retainer deal? They are all basically the same playing the same game.

Correct!

it would also mean being sure any new carrier doesn’t mast or band share with my current provider or simply resell my existing network.

Vodafone and Telefonica share masts via Cornerstone. Three and EE share masts via MBNL. But that doesn’t mean they’re sharing cells on those masts. It’s fair to say that Vodafone’s data network is struggling, but I’ve no idea whether that’s at the RAN layer or more at the core level.

But, I vowed never to go back to Vodafone for various reasons

I deal with them every day (thankfully, because we’re a wholesale customer, we aren;t covered by their retail billing systems). Basically, they put in a new billing system. These things are enormously complex, fraught with opportunities to go wrong and are always under pressure to be delivered earlier and for less money than they ought to be. As it was they went hugely over budget and were years late.

It seems that pretty much everything you wouldn’t want to go wrong has gone wrong, which has catapulted them to being Ofcom’s most complained about mobile provider. The challenge is that the agents dealing with the avalanche of legitimate complaints are doing their best to resolve customer issues, but the systems and operating structures just aren’t set up to cope with the volume.

I’d never feel sorry for Vodafone about anything but this is one big old mess they’ve got into….