giffgaff, the "Mobile network run by you" certainly isn't how I would run a mobile network.
They have spent a huge amount of cash this year rebranding their website and logo (and made a right hash of it in the process).
In addition, giffgaff have upped their spending on TV advertising recently, which I am sure that most giffgaff customers would prefer to have been spent on buying additional data allocations from parent network, O2.
I've given giffgaff a good try. They were pretty useless last year: I ported my main phone number in to them but left after three months due to a total lack of data signal. I've also experienced awful call quality on giffgaff: I can hear the other person well enough, but they have been unable to hear me.
However, I've been making extensive use of their free giffgaff to giffgaff calls and texts, which has saved me a great deal of money and negated the need to buy a monthly bundle from them, or anyone else.
This free service is great, as all you need to do is top up £10 every three months to keep this free service going (most networks require a £10 monthly top up to get free same network calls).
If you are interested in getting these free calls and texts for yourself and some friends/family members, you can order a free giffgaff SIM here, which will also come with £5 of free credit upon activation.
I can put up with a few issues on this network as I'm saving money, but my main mobile number can't stay with giffgaff any longer.
I've recently started to experience (again!) texts that fail to send. Sometimes, my phone will tell me that the text failed to send, so I'll try again. In most cases I've needed to re-send the message about four times on average, which is not acceptable.
There is also the risk that your phone won't tell you if a text failed to send, so you'll never know if the recipient received the text or not.
Giffgaff charge for all of these texts, whether they get sent or not, which is unacceptable.
Another reason I've decided to pack in wiht giffgaff is the ongoing issue with dropped calls.
So many calls connect, but then drop after less than a minute, which is incredibly annoying.
For the free giffgaff to giffgaff calls, this is just about bearable, but for other calls it is pretty poor.
There have been occasions where I've been called, but have been unable to hear the other person and I/they have hung up.
The final straw came last night - I got a 4G mobile purely to use data in my home village (there's 2G, 4G but no 3G - Thanks O2!), but giffgaff's data speeds on 4G have been abysmal: 0.53mbps download speed pretty much everywhere in North Hampshire during the day, if the data connection works at all.
Last night I did a speed test on giffgaff's 4G. It was about 01:00am and I got around 7.6mbps down and upload speeds - I should be able to get these speeds all day, not just in the middle of the night!
This "traffic shaping" is due to giffgaff being at the bottom of the pile for O2's network services: Giffgaff buy a quantity of data from O2 during the year, and to ensure that the service for O2 customers isn't degraded by giffgaff, they deploy traffic shaping to stifle the connection of giffgaff customers.
This is bad enough for data, but the call and text issues are also caused by "mast congestion", where O2 and Tesco Mobile customers get priority over giffgaff customers.
For these reasons, I cannot continue to use giffgaff for my main phone number.
I have tried, tested and used many mobile networks. For my mobile network reviews, please refer to my PAYG mobile bundles website, mobile-networks-uk.weebly.com/mobile-network-reviews.html
