We use three.co.uk on our phones and tablets for two main reasons;
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They give “all you can eat data”
They have the best broadband coverage in rural areas of any provider, (any fool can have coverage in the cities or you can find a nearby wi-fi)
These are two massive pro’s – unfortunately the list of “cons” with Three are as long as your arm…
First and foremost is support, it involves phone calls to Asia, to operatives who are continually “sorry”, or “very sorry”, using their phones which frankly don’t work too well from their location, so half the time you can’t hear, and the other half you can’t understand each other.
Then there’s their menuing system for support, which seems to have more loops than a can of spaghetti hoops, so often you find yourself back where you started without having spoken to anyone. When you do get answered you spend 20 minutes being “authorised” before they will speak to you about anything, they then tell you you need someone else for that, and transfer you. If the call doesn’t get dropped, you have to go through the “authorisation” process all over again.
The other evening we decided that we really needed to do something about the lousy reception we get at home, we have to be next to, or even hang out a window, to make a call or send a text. So we made the call and got through to a very nice young man who was “very sorry” but was going to solve our problem, we then got into a discussion about our broadband access (which is in fact via 3), using a Wibe to make a connection. Then we got cut off, (Maybe I had moved too far back inside the window?)
So far we had taken 40 minutes and our evening meal was ready, we thought they might call back but didn’t
Next day at work we called again, usual palaver and difficulty, but eventually got another “sorry” young man, who checked our home postcode, and said “Oh yes there are lots of reports on problems there, we are working on the masts, and it should be finished by Monday”. (shades of deja-vu here last year we had two local masts out, Three promised they would be fixed, (after initial denials of the problem), next week, by the end of the month, next day, for over two months!
I explained this wasn’t the cause of our phone problems, as we have always had poor reception inside the house, and we needed something to “Bring the outside signal inside”. “Well we will contact you when the masts are finished, but meanwhile we have an app you can use. It isn’t compatible with your Samsung S3 mini, but will work with everything else”!
After several attempts I located this app on the “Google Store” (that’s the place Google give the idiotic name of “Google Play”), its not called, as I was told “3 in touch”, but “Three in Touch“, and seems not to be reliably found by Google within their own store, no matter.
Next issue Google told me it was not compatible with four of our five devices, The Samsung Galaxy S3 mini, (we knew about) My Prestigio Multipad Colour 3G, Jool’s Samsung Galaxy GTi-5500, our old (and obsolete) HTC Wildfire, leaving my venerable HTC Desire as the sole potential user of this problem solver.
I downloaded the app and fired it up only to be told that because my phone is “rooted” the app wouldn’t install!
Another blooper from 3 !
Having investigated a little it seems this app is in effect a derivation of Voip, where the phone calls are conveyed over the internet to you router, (weirdly in our case that would be via Threes own signals), and then using wi-fi to to the individual devices? This they say does not affect your online bandwidth or data usage? I am unable to quite see how, and as it won’t work on our kit am unable to check much further.
What might be a useful app is however ruined by the amount of things it is incompatible with, not only does the app list five or six popular devices, but the Google store excludes many others, and the fact that anyone with “root” access will not be able to install it, makes it unsuitable for huge swathes of Three’s customers.
