sinéad

Read the replies to the science week inspired question “What change would you make to an existing piece of technology” here and Johnny K’s here. If someone would like to keep the ball rolling please do. We all need inspiration at some point – I’m quite a sporadic Blogger, science week was the most I’ve ever written in such a short space of time, of course there was that extra piece of motivation too.

Speaking of changes to existing technology…

This was going to be is a long-winded post explaining how annoying it is being a pay-as-you-go customer on 3 Ireland - I mean come on, if a network can’t even get their basic pay-as-you-go service right then how can you trust them to get anything else right?. I’ve decided to condense these issues into bullet points so as to reduce the cognitive constraints on those from the network that might possibly end up reading this.

• Please make it easier to top-up my phone. O2, Vodafone and Meteor provide you with the ability to top-up by text message, by online/phone banking, on their individual websites and from ATM machines (you can probably top-up by homing pigeon too). 3 provides none of these services and to this day I still have difficulty getting 083 credit, especially from those automatic machines that are everywhere. You can call their customer service department in Mumbai where you can request to top-up by credit or laser card, but this process takes about 20 minutes as it requires the customer service person to call you back. Not everyone has a credit or laser card either, so this is a bit of a pain.
• Please offer free web text messages. This is probably the handiest service all the other networks offer to their customers. I can’t imagine any short of cash college/school student would give these up.
• Please sell your sim-cards by themselves. Self explanatory.
• Please provide me with the settings for my sim-free phone. 3 don’t offer any handsets with a qwerty keyboard, I’d love to be able to buy any phone I want.
• Please upgrade your coverage. I’ve heard this phrase “piggy backs” about 100 times from 3, this is the concept that when you move out of coverage you “piggy back” onto another network. In reality what actually happens is – your phone loses coverage but your handset tells you that you still have coverage, but in reality you’re not able to make or receive calls. This happens often (it’s not my phone, because it happens to Jen too). Anyone that works in the Jervis Centre in Dublin City Centre will tell you – you 100% cannot use your 3 Network phone anywhere in there, it’s rather bizarre actually.
• Please start selling upgrades to pay-as-you-go customers. If you’re already a pay-as-you-go customer and you want a new phone on Three all that lovely free credit is completely lost to you for loads of really boring reasons. If you’re on O2, Meteor and Vodafone they practically reward you for upgrading your phone.
• Please sort out your automated phone menus. When you call customer service you must first listen to about 1 minute full of recorded messages, there is no ability to skip through them, none at all. When you’re calling up to top-up you can’t skip through the recorded messages either. It’s very frustrating.
• Please reduce the cost of calls. Self explanatory.

For all of the above reasons I shall be moving to Vodafone in the New Year. The only reason I have stayed with the Three Network was because of the full Internet Access on my phone. Now Vodafone have this, but if I want to I can use any phone on their network (I could even get an unlocked HTC handset (a.k.a an XDA) and use it with lovely full Internet access, not that awful O2 imode). Although, if the Samsung F700 comes out anytime soon (why that advert in the Metro recently?!) I’ll be getting that on Vodafone bill… because, I’ll need to make sure it’s insured won’t I?

Related: Damien Mulley is currently testing the 3 Skypephone.

Update: The F700 didn’t launch soon enough for me and I ended up changing to Meteor and I’m actually saving a fortune, I’ve downgraded phone wise (no more mobile internet) which is a pity, but having mobile internet access is really not worth the really expensive call charges.