Fiddling with phones

Since I swapped my phone over to something I can actually use I’ve been calling and texting quite a bit more. In fact I’ve even had to top up the Pay As You Go (PAYG) which I hadn’t had to do for over a year. This rather surprised me as I was mostly just sending texts with the odd quick call and an update of the operating system. I had a look at T-Mobile’s website to discover that they were now charging me 14p per text, £1 for the privilege of using data and an eye-watering 35p/minute to make calls – in fact they even charge a pretty hefty 20p/min to phone “free” 0800 numbers. I hadn’t really noticed how high their costs had gone as I really only used the phone occasionally with the odd high burst when away from home or abroad (I originally chose T-Mobile for their German coverage.)

Mobile phone firms really try to tie people into monthly packages tied to “free” phones but this doesn’t suit me. I wanted something that was PAYG but with the ability to boost it to a more inclusive package for the odd month when I had more frequent mobile requirements. T-Mobile didn’t seem to do anything suitable but there are quite a few virtual phone providers such as Asda and Tesco that do this sort of thing. The one I picked up on was Giffgaff (prior to that I had just assumed was some bit of random advertising prior to The Big Bang Theory.) Anyway, it turns out that Giffgaff is a spin off from 02 that runs a reasonably priced PAYG service with the addition of “Goody Bags”: prepaid packs of free call minutes, texts and data downloads that apply for a fixed period. This seemed to do what I wanted…

Except it didn’t. I logged on to their website and tried to order a SIM. It threw up an error and suggested that it would work if I tried again. I did, it didn’t. The unique selling point with Giffgaff is that it is largely user supported. They have extensive help forums and I have to say that the people posting on these forums are both helpful and polite which makes a real difference in these days of universal internet rudery. I tried various suggestions such as using different browsers and clicking on links from the users’ signature banners. None of this seemed to work so I gave up for the day. The next day I received 20 emails telling me that a variety of SIMs were in the post!

The problem was I didn’t know whether the batch of emails were a computer brain-fart cleared by an eagled eyed ops manager or whether I really was going to receive a batch of SIMs. To date I haven’t received any but I ended up going down a different route which is related to me checking out the mobile coverage. There are two mobile masts at the end of our road. I know one of them is operated by T-Mobile but I didn’t know who ran the other. It turns out that it is operated by Three, one of the smallest of the mobile operators but also one with an offer that really appealed to me: 3p/min for calls, 2p per text and 1p per MB of data – all with the option of boosting with their version of the “Goody Bag”. I sent off for a SIM.

The SIM duly arrived and the coverage in the house is fine. It also seems to work at most of the other I’ve tried so it is beginning to look like a bargain (less than 10% of my previous charges). That just left the task of swapping my mobile number, something I’ve never done before. It turns out to be a really simple task and I have to give some credit here to T-Mobile whose call centre staff were very helpful and not in the least bit obstructive when I told them I wanted to leave and asked for the PAC code (possibly they saw how low my mobile usage is). I then put this into Three’s online transfer form and 24 hours later I was all switched over. If only swapping energy and broadband was that simple.

So that is me vaguely into the 21st Century with a phone that I like, can use and a mobile rate that won’t threaten to bankrupt me. I suppose the next thing is to get a PC that doesn’t run some ancient version of Linux.