I have been an Orange / EE customer for 15 years and a couple of years ago I switched to PAYG as I was annoyed with the large bills that I was receiving and it seemed ( it is ) that it was an expensive hire purchase on a piece of hardware – 12 month contracts with free replacements and voicemail changed to 24 month contracts with no freebies chucked in. Suddenly instead of feting the customers it seemed like the customers were made to feel honoured to use / pay for the service.
Anyway I got on with Orange, finding out after 6 months that you could buy packages of minutes and texts and web use for a fiver a throw – only for these to go up to £7.50 quite quickly.
The final straw with Orange’s thieving bastard system (oops ) was that if you buy say 100 minutes and start using them and then think ” oh no if i finish these off by accident I will start paying 25p a minute so you buy another 100 minutes (£7,50 ) thinking good I’ve got 135 minutes left. The system then starts using up the new minutes ( they last a month from date of purchase by the way ) before the old ones are used up so if you don’t speak too much your initial top up’s remaining 35 minutes expire whilst you chat on the newly purchased minutes.
So I looked up on Giffgaff and saw that for 12 pounds a month I can get what would cost me probably 35 on EE/ Orange – they have a nice system which notifies me of my balance at all times and the website does the same.
This is not paid for this post, just I felt I oughtta share my displeasure of previous supplier and my pleasure of finding a good new one.