More gaff than giff: The consumer-run network falters

This is a bit of a negative review.

I think you need to stop crying over 30 minutes of downtime and because you didn’t get a lovely call from them asking how you are and if you want a cuppa. I didn’t get one either. Get on with it, you whiny muppet.

You love the free internet, the pricing of their goodybags but you attack their community, who don’t run the company, they enhance it. There’s a team that work and run the company, the community help each other so things are smoother.

Enjoy paying over-the-odds and not getting payback with one of the big providers! Your loss.

And no, I’m not angry at all. I think you need to be a bit fairer with your outlandish statement(s).

And finally, you are welcome back at any time, just be nice and patient, you’ve obviously never watched a Guinness advert!

That’s my error – I tagged this post for Dan.

And in answer to your question, when services I run fail my tweet tweet (or similar) links to a forum or a blog post explaining what is known and what is happening to resolve it. It usually starts with the word ‘sorry’ too… even when the ‘customer’ is getting the service free.

Actually Dean, I didn’t mention the community at all. If I were to mention the community I’d mention how someone took the work I did on creating an iPhone provisioning profile, rewrote the instructions and now gets all the payback points but the article is about a number of considerable failings on the part of giffgaff and nothing to do with the community.

The community can help each other all they want but ultimately when there is an outage all they can do is speculate wildly about the issue. What GiffGaff needs to do during these outages is step up and say something – ANYTHING will do, just acknowledge what’s going on.

In my opinion giffgaff have failed to competently run an MVNO and the supporting infrastructure (payment processing, customer support etc) and I no longer have any faith in their ability to provide me with an adequate level of service.

You can call me a whiny muppet and defend them all you like but the simple fact is that no matter how arrogant this sounds – I’m far more qualified to comment than you.

Thats funny cos my mates sim on O2 this afternoon did not work for over 30mins even tho he had a good signal.. This was at the exact same time GiffGaff went down as i’m on GG..
As for your mate not being able to get the sim to work why not order another?

Why are you winging like a little girl about the network being down?? They all go down once in a while… Stop crying like a baby!!

As I said in the article, my O2 SIM was working fine during the outage. Because there was no official announcement from Giffgaff that is the only information I have to go on.

I think you’re concentrating on the wrong parts of the article – there is no such thing as a perfect service and things do go wrong, it’s a fact of life. Where Giffgaff are failing is picking up on these issues and dealing with them appropriately.

Why would my friend order another SIM when the one they originally sent him was faulty and they failed to recognise this until I got involved on his behalf via press contacts? Why exactly would anyone want to use a service where the customer support team aren’t familiar enough with their own service to know if you need to sign up before activating a SIM card?

To save a couple of pounds per month? It’s not worth the effort to most people.

Really? When was the last major network outage for any other network?

Cell sites, yes. Networks, no.

As I said below, I think you’re concentrating on the wrong parts of the article – there is no such thing as a perfect service and things do go wrong, it’s a fact of life. Where Giffgaff are failing is picking up on these issues and dealing with them appropriately.

Orange has had problems this week: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/08/19/orange_down/
With calls and data.

No-one really cares so much to write story about it and winge.. Cr@p happens… get over it… booo hoooo booo hooo

What like this you mean http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/08/19/orange_down/

OOOOHHHHHH Please get a bloody life !!!!!

Just because you’re a geek at this network crap doesn’t mean I’m a mug when it comes to mobile phones and their networks.

You know you’ve went wrong somewhere in life when you’re blogging about a ‘failed mobile network’ which is actually doing really well. Every network has problems with downtime. And someone will get ‘payback points’ for stealing your post or whatever? Absolute crap, you’ve obviously been with giffgaff for about 3 hours.

I’ve been with giffgaff for a week after being with it’s parent but seperate company, O2. I get much better value (saving at least £5 a month AND I get whatever payback at the end of the month) AND more minutes!

Of course, giffgaff has technical hitches, but with a community as strong as ours, it’s usually resolved soon enough.

And also, you might be more ‘qualified’ to talk about cellular networks than me, but not more than giffgaff.

No, not like that because:

1. It was data only. Calling was fine. It was not a total outage.
2. Orange put press and comms out about it explaining the problem.
3. It made the mainstream national technical press it was such a serious incident.

Um, sorry? Try reading the article you linked…

“voice continues to work OK”. It wasn’t calling it was data only.

…and what do you mean “No-one really cares so much to write story about it”? You linked The Register which wrote about it and the comments are *full* of their customers going mad… and that was *only* a data outage.

You’re welcome to disagree with Dan’s views, but for the record Dan and I have been using giffgaff since we interviewed the management team in November on launch day and were given SIMs there.

The community can’t (and didn’t) fix the network outage and (from my reading of the forums) neither did they know what was going on or why.

“I’ve been with giffgaff for a week after being with it’s parent but seperate company, O2. I get much better value (saving at least £5 a month AND I get whatever payback at the end of the month) AND more minutes!
…
And also, you might be more ‘qualified’ to talk about cellular networks than me, but not more than giffgaff.”

Where to start… You’ve been with giffgaff for a week, and that makes you more qualified to comment than Dan who has been with them since launch and experienced the turn-up of multiple accounts?

You seem to be confusing the terms value and cost, there are a lot of people out there (myself included) that consider paying a bit extra to get a more responsive service good value.

Outages and problem installs are inevitable. That is true on any carrier. The real measure of a company is not how well they cope with things going well, it is how they respond when things go wrong.

If you have experience with giffgaff dealing well with issues then I’m sure we’d all like to hear them as a balance to Dan’s bad experiences.

Also, you can actually fit a lot of information about an outage in a 140 character tweet. Especially if you include a link to a blog post with a full explanation.

Ben, Dan … 11th May O2 was down for HOURS (I think it was the construction site problems caused loss of power somewhere taking pretty much the entire network out). With absolutely NO comment at all from o2 (as usual), check my tweets on that day around 9pm, I remember seeing loads of tweets from o2 customers at the time.

I should probably note that O2 seem to only do business hours on twitter, which isn’t very helpful.

As for GiffGaff, I completely agree with Dan’s comments, in my opinion its not so much that they had an outage, its the same as with O2, they didn’t tell anyone what was going on.

It was extremely nice of GiffGaff to send me that microsim cutter from the twitter competition when I was having O2 idiot issues with the iphone 3g -> iphone 4 upgrade the other week, however, prizes and being nice don’t generally solve customer service issues.

Personally, I think I’ll wait and see how GiffGaff sort things out before deciding if I still want to move to them, these problems have given me a bit of a pause, thats all.

Whilst I do find the overall tone of the post negative, I think posts like this are essential in making companies accountable for their failings. Unless issues like these are documented for all to read, there is little reason for the management to address them… and publicly detail what they’ve done. Hopefully, in giffgaff’s case, this will lead to an improvement in the way they communicate technical problems to their customer-base.

What I find interesting about the comments on there is that the attitude of the people criticising the article seems to be “Giffgaff is run for the users, therefore you can’t judge it by the same standards as other companies”. This “my company right or wrong” tribal attitude is common in the tech community, but less so in the wider world (see the Apple/Linux/Android zealots for further examples).

A bit of brand loyalty is a good thing and I have a few for which my enthusiasm is beyond what an individual product deserves…

But…

In this case I think the posters are also being motivated by the financial incentive (payback) giffgaff offer for forum ‘kudos’. If you portray Dan’s complaints as ‘anti community’ and then post about how he’s stupid and ignorant then you attract extra ‘yellow star’ clicks of kudos. I just checked and at least one of the posters here asks for kudos clicks in the signature to all his forum posts.

Fair comment re: O2, although O2′s cock-up doesn’t excuse others or prove it ‘happens all the time’ which was the suggestion.

Spot-on. We gave giffgaff plenty of positive and detailed coverage previously too, so it wouldn’t be balanced unless we called them out when there was reasonable evidence of customer service failings multiple times.

Ben, I completely agree with you. One network having an issue NEVER excuses poor customer service or problems with either other networks or MVNOs. I note that GiffGaff did tweet an apology a few hours ago, but, as with O2 when it happened with them, not enough information and NO WHERE NEAR quick enough, should have tweeted that during the problem, even if you don’t know what it is.

I’m starting to think that ALL networks / services should have a status page on their website to show what is working and what isn’t, it would make things easier (and in theory stop so many calls to find out whats wrong !!)

Wow. I was actually looking forward to deriding a pompus blogger with a god complex. It seems, however, that his comments (while a little sweeping) are fairly reasonable.
In the grand scheme of things, 30 minutes isn’t a long time (even if you are as narcissistic as this guy) but a simple tweet could have helped. Personally, I dont really feel the need to know why it’s down, but would like to think efforts are being made to fix the issue rather than update me as to the nature of the fault.

To call the entire venture a disaster doesn’t add a lot of credibility to the post, especially with a few faithful readers lining up to be sycophants.
I think you have a point, but you make it like a six year old with the wrong flavour jelly.

By the way; I just tried logging in via twitter and it’s failed twice. I had to resort to yahoo login.

Keep an eye out for my blog on why twitter is doomed to failure for this lack of customer involvement.

For the record the adverts are definitely *not* ‘cute’.

If it was just the outage then I think the ‘so what’ brigade might have a little more cred (I’d still disagree, but it would be a more nuanced argument), but they’ve also cocked up SIM issuing, customer support, billing, referral payments and data charging… in some cases cocking them up so badly only direct contact with the press person has yielded any kind of sense in the responses. Remember – this is 6 months of pain, not 30 mins. The fans might put up with this, but regular consumers – the ones giffgaff needs to attract to make the business work – will quickly leave.

Sycophantic? Not especially – I’m more than happy to tell Dan he’s wrong when he is (and he is sometimes), but giffgaff need a kick up the pants to improve otherwise they’ll follow the same path as the last network with a ‘completely different model’ (albeit ad funded, not community-based) Blyk, which was a nice idea that slowly drove all its customers away with outages and rotten CS until it closed-down in the UK

Try reading our previous coverage to see this comment in context: http://thereallymobileproject.com/tag/giffgaff/

Not keen? I’m not sure if I *like* them, but they did grab my attention… which I guess is most of the battle.

That’s actually a really piece of context Ben; highlighting the fact that not only have giffgaff had broadly positive coverage from Really Mobile, but have also had the benefit of *all* of us covering their service.

I’m intrigued; how would you define ‘doing really well’ ?

Off-topic slightly but, I saw the iPhone/invalid.name link on the giffgaff community pages the other day and did wonder why your name wasn’t mentioned. I thought perhaps you’d given them the information to use and that the person posting was a mod or an admin.

Apparently not. Sounds like a great ‘community’.

They grossed me out to be honest. Not exactly the kind of thing you want to look at first thing in the morning on the way out of the tube, that’s for certain.

I am definately with you on this one James – whilst I am a great fan of the GiffGaff concept I thought that the brainless and repulsive ad campaign mounted by GiffGaff was a total waste of money.

I would be interested to see what the huge expenditure did for their sign up rate – based on the reaction I have seen, nt a lot would be the answer!

Just for the record – I have just had to wait for about 15 minutes to regain service (on 3 UK) in order to post my last comment. During this period I was unable to access the internet or make any voice calls (on my iPhone 4 – also on 3).

The display of my MiFi (super bit of kit) enigmatically displayed “SMS Only” during this time.

So – GiffGaff are not the only ones that suffer issues. Luckily I had a Truphone Local Anywhere SIM (in a Motorola Milestone Android 2.1 handset) – which worked perfectly!

Given the absence of screaming though I doubt Three’s entire network
was down. Localised failures or coverage issues *are* the norm and
very different to what happened to giffgaff.

Just because you and your friends don’t like it does’nt mean it’s crap.I have been with it for a month and it has been amazing. It’s an issue GiffGaff are working on and you being a good blogger I thought you would guess that GiffGaff don’t have enough time on their hands to fix an issue and post a 7 paragraphed blog post at the same time. They are only a small company and working hard to do everything right, so stop your whining and get on with it

That’s right… because the team who do the tweeting and the press liaison also fix the network, programme the computers and even put the SIMs in the little cardboard envelopes to post out. And in the evenings they all go ’round the gaffer’s house and colour in the poster for Dave to stick up at the train stations on his way in to work.

giffgaff were plenty big enough to meet us – several times – when they wanted to publicise their launch. And they’re completely owned by O2 who are part of the Telefónica group – the 4th largest telecoms company in the world.

So no. On every count.

Thanks for playing.

You’re missing the point! As a blog we do actually like the idea of GiffGaff, we like the team that runs GiffGaff and we’ve previously been impressed with the GiffGaff service and we’ve given them plenty of good coverage.

I’ve been impressed enough to recommend GiffGaff to my friends and colleagues – not because I want GiffGaff points (I’m not that desperate for a fiver) but because I think the service would be of value to them.

When GiffGaff fails on very basic things like the signup process, taking payment or sending out SIM cards that aren’t broken it reflects badly on me personally as I recommended them. What makes this doubly unacceptable is when their customer service department are unable to help these people get up and running without having to make a fuss (see the part where the broken SIM issue was misdiagnosed with very incorrect issues).

I don’t expect miracles like 100% uptime but I do expect service providers to provide a competent level of service.

Yes but it is sad to talk about giffgaff in that manner. They are only a new network and they deserve a good reputation for what they have done with it so far. I’m just a bit annoyed at the post as it was a bit mean to speak about a newly amazing cheap rated network that way.

Why are you annoyed? are they your friends? Will they come round for tea, fuss your cat and tell your mum her cooking is lovely? No, GiffGaff is part of a business which has one purpose: to make money for it’s shareholders.

GiffGaff is only special in that it’s an experiment in creating a new kind of mobile network that has far lower overheads by creating a strong self-supporting community instead of filling call centres with the sort of idiots who can’t pick their nose without getting into some kind of distress. This is a great idea in theory since putting an idiot at a desk costs at least £50,000/year (salary, tax, equipment, office space, insurance etc etc) and throwing out some giffgaff points to an appreciative audience costs them a pittance and makes them feel warm and fuzzy enough to come to our blog and call me names when I make very valid criticisms.

As it happens, I’ve met the management team of GiffGaff and they ARE nice people but that doesn’t mean they are doing a particularly good job of running their network.

You said that they deserve a good reputation based on the fact that they are a new network and for what they have done so far… rubbish! They HAD a good reputation from me otherwise I wouldn’t have recommended them. Unlike 99% of their users I wasn’t making my recommendations based on getting £5 worth of credit for free (it probably cost me more than all the payback points I’d earned in spending time writing this blog post and replying to the comments) but because I liked the service provided by GiffGaff.

When that service stops being good and makes me look like an idiot for recommending them… then the teeth come out. As I said in the article, GiffGaff can fix this but they have to make sure everyone is doing the very best job they can instead of the half-assed effort I’ve seen recently.

But that not what you said..you didn’t define call services you said major network outage and it was. It is a major network outage as it was UK spread and not a cell tower as you seem to think are the outages.

lol and now you move the goal posts because you got it wrong and you haven’t got the humility to say so. Poor poor show

The network is the infrastructure supporting services such as calling and data. That’s what I meant and it’s a very normal use of the term. A ‘network outage’ is something that takes out all the services – a data outage isn’t a network outage because the other stuff kept working.

You’re certainly right network outages do happen, but given the examples you cite go back at least 4 years and each was reported by a large media organisation who felt it was news-worthy I’m comfortable my assertion that it doesnt happen ‘all the time’ stands.

The network is the infrastructure supporting services such as calling and data. That’s what I meant and it’s a very normal use of the term. A ‘network outage’ is something that takes out all the services – a data outage isn’t a network outage because the other stuff kept working.

You’re certainly right network outages do happen, but given the examples you cite go back at least 4 years and each was reported by a large media organisation who felt it was news-worthy I’m comfortable my assertion that it doesnt happen ‘all the time’ stands.

Id say better than anything your arrogance and condescending attitude more than adequately explain you.

That’s the first time I’ve ever heard Ben called arrogant and condescending. I think you’ll find there is a big difference between being arrogant and actually knowing what you’re talking about.

(and for future reference, I’m the arrogant condescending one of the group)

Wow. Rude.

Oh dear!

Perhaps the Really Mobile Project could make some really valid criticisms … based on doing their own research into a half hour outage, rather than rehashing what they discovered on the company’s own website.

I just wonder what this band of experts would have to say about a certain other provider which will remain nameless

I was promised on half a dozen occasions that service would resume shortly. But those occasions were spread over 3 or 4 months. In the end it was admitted that there had been severe technical problems, that they didn’t know when service would resume, and that this might be affecting up to 1 in 6 of the whole customer base.

They would contact the chief executive, and he might even contact me back personally. That didn’t happen, but just over a week later, service is resumed. Just as well, as I was worrying what would happen if someone else got my phone number and then mine was reactivated.

But I can’t find anything anywhere on the internet about this.

Can you throw any light on these problems?

Presumably not, as there seems to be a post here a few days ago rhetorically doing down any possibility that things like this ever happen.

If the problem you experienced impacted a significant number of people to the extent you describe we’ll gladly write about it – it’s a important story. Contact us privately by email using the address available from the ‘contact’ page (right at the top), because I don’t recognise the problem as you’ve described it.

However, this article specifically cites issues experienced by several users over about 6 months on several different accounts so suggesting it’s sourced from the giffgaff website is not correct.

Can you elaborate on what did actually happen in that half hour?

I was referring specifically to the network outage for half an hour.

You don’t seem to have any original insight into or information about this, except that the article writer went to read about it on the giffgaff forum, rather like the naive and sheep-like customers you and your colleagues are naturally superior to.

And to be specific, the article is inaccurate in its detail – the network did not appear to completely die.

Phones still had a signal shown on the screen.
Data services were still working perfectly ok.
Text messages were still received, from both off and on network
Sending text messages appeared to fail, but actually sent multiple copies.
Incoming and outgoing calls did not work.

So, it’s quite possible that most users would have seen a signal shown on the screen and never noticed a problem if they didn’t attempt to actually use the phone for sms or an outgoing call.

As your colleague prefers a hyperbolic remark to specific facts, I will stick for now with 2 assumptions:

Your colleague didn’t test what was or was not working, and didn’t read the descriptions on the forum that carefully either.

Despite the grandiloquence, none of you know anything about the genesis and disappearance of that problem.

I disagree with your conclusions, but you’re welcome to your views and I’ll leave them here intact despite the tone.

Oh, that’s nice.

You guys can be as abusive or petulant in your tone as you like, and some other people have remarked on that, but if someone stands up and points out a slight lack of professionalism in your research, veiled hints of possible censorship might be deployed.

From the log of a Nokia X6 phone

24/08 16:39 GPRS, duration 33m41, sent 52kB, received 157 kB

that is right through the affected time

and there were also 7 copies of a single sms I sent to this phone from an E51, delivered through the same period – the other phone kept thinking it had failed, and tried sending again, succeeding without noting the fact

I am not lying about this, but your colleague’s claim that the whole network completely died is either wilfully disingenuous, or wild exaggeration, or perhaps just inattention to detail.

Ha ha, my apologies

The outage was on the 23rd, but I picked and checked the 24th, as that was the date on the blog, presumably written after midnight

But there is data use on the 23rd at that time on one phone, and the sent and received messages in the two phone logs

I really don’t have the energy to discuss this any more, but I’ll make one last plea to you and the other people unhappy with this post and then leave the comments to run…

- Note any (other) factual information you have on the fault here.
- Re-read the post and consider all of the issues raised in totality.
- Take a quick look at our previous giffgaff coverage – by Dan and others – and consider whether there is bias, malice or another unfair agenda here.
- Consider honestly whether the closing call to improve in this post could still be reasonably be expressed – whether or not you agree with it – in light of all that.
- If you do, feel free to say why things are good enough (or even better).

I think I’ve already posted a more empirical observation of that network fault than you have.

One of the posts on another branch of this hints that you guys know more about this but aren’t saying.

But there is no reply to my request to elaborate.

As for the totality of the article, well, look at how it constructs itself, building up to a crescendo, adopting the phrase about a last straw, when the writer got so upset that he stopped rationally reporting the facts in front of his eyes and pretended the whole network had fallen over and died.

Yes, there are some issues, and the network needs to do some work on them.

And it is doing so, in the words of various members of staff, including Mr Fairman himself.

- something that you folks don’t seem to have mentioned, in your clamour to characterise it as unresponsive.

Could you make that first paragraph just a tad more facetious and surreal, just in case some of us still didn’t realise how much you guys like making things up and patronising people.

How could they possibly know more? To what are you hinting at? Make sense man!

I think the question should be what are you guys hinting at.

On other branches of this discussion, there are comments such as

“Given the absence of screaming though I doubt Three’s entire network
was down. Localised failures or coverage issues *are* the norm and
very different to what happened to giffgaff. ”

And other comments that repeat the original author’s portrayal of a total outage, for example answwering comments about an Orange problem by saying, ahhh, but it still had this or that service

Well, as I pointed out, not all aspects of giffgaff were down either

But you guys seem to be trying to hint that giffgaff is keeping a secret, or adopting a tone that you know better.

Dude.

1. I didn’t write the article. Dan did. ‘What you guys are hinting at’ doesn’t work.
2. I’ve been on the giffgaff community forums and seen that Dan isn’t the only one who complained about the network being down. It wasn’t just him and (it seems like) it wasn’t localised either. If it wasn’t completely down to you then fair enough. But your log from your X6 was both from the wrong day *and* the wrong time.
3. Where is Dan hinting that giffgaff are hiding/keeping a secret? I honestly don’t see that bit. Sorry.

To be honest mate, I’m just trying to find out what exactly is the issue here? That’s all.

Cheers

We’re not hinting at anything, we have no hidden agenda and if you’d like to accuse of something please go ahead.

If you actually read the article you’ll see that my experience with GiffGaff started positively and went downhill rapidly. The outage was just the final straw and what annoyed me so much throughout each of these instances wasn’t the technical failures but the way they were dealt with by GiffGaff staff. You can argue the toss over what was or wasn’t down until the cows come home but ultimately on each occasion something didn’t work and it wasn’t handled to my satisfaction.

The only thing we claim to know better is how to handle customer service issues.

I think we should just stamp a big FAILURE on this “experiment” and move on to a proper network…

…sadly, they’re all equally shit at different times of the day.

(although if I were to choose a gun for russian roulette, it would be the one with the O2 logo on it).

I pointed out my mistake about the log myself within a few minutes, so don’t try and be clever about that.

All 3 of you are talking in a number of posts each about an outage, amplifying those remarks to say that you use the phrase to mean no service at all, and countering other examples people mentioned by saying that some services remained in those cases

I’m not the only person to have observed that text messages were shown by the sending phone as apparently not sent, yet were received several times over.

Only calls were not working on giffgaff.

And the article author didn’t do any tests to establish that. Or if he did he certainly didn’t bother to mention them.

I don’t expect a detailed explanation of how the different services on a mobile network integrate with each other, or might sometimes fail singly or severally, but you could at least have checked which bits were working.

1. Irrespective of any mistake you made, I’m just trying to point out that you don’t know what was and what wasn’t working as the ‘proof’ you provided was in accurate. If this is untrue, please go ahead and explain in more detail.

2. I’m fairly sure I haven’t posted anything about any outage. I’ve commented on a post (like you) that Dan wrote, but that’s all. In fact, I’m almost certain my comments have hardly been about the ‘outage’ at all!

3. How do you know it was only calls? You weren’t there for Dan’s experiences. Are you accusing him of lying?

4. From this comment (in the post itself) – “…at around 4-5pm the giffgaff network appeared to completely die for at least 30 minutes. No calls or texts in or out for that whole period.” – that, to me at least, reads like Dan tested the network for a full 30mins both trying to make calls and send text messages.

5. What do you expect?

6. Why don’t you use your giffgaff name when commenting?

7. How’s the community these days?

1. Don’t lie about what I said, please, and that’s your second snipe

What do you want, a list of text messages? One was sent from one phone at 1636, and received on the other 7 times between 1643 and 1647. Oh, I suppose that’s no good and you want a photo of the log, then you could start up that I’d forged it, yawn …

3/4. Dan says it the whole network apparently completely died. If he had no signal, he wouldn’t have been able to test those services. Which is it?

He said he read the forum, yet he doesn’t seem to notice posts remarking about texts still being received ok, or about some erroneously being shown as failed sending but in fact being sent and received several times.

I don’t quite understand what exactly it is you want from us… you seem to be arguing for the sake of an argument.

I’ve already told you and several others in this thread that the issue is with how GiffGaff handles their problems and not with any specific problems (of which the outage you keep dwelling on is only one of several and only gets a brief mention in the article).

If you refuse to accept the article as a whole in the spirit it was intended then I suggest you stop commenting until you are able to do so in the correct context, we welcome constructive debate but not mindless circular disagreement.

And for completeness-sake in case you are reading this assuming we’re on some kind of anti-giffgaff crusade – we’re not! We’ve published plenty of positive and neutral coverage of GiffGaff in the past – http://thereallymobileproject.com/tag/giffgaff/

the last straw that broke the camel’s back, and provoked the whole article, that is a brief mention?

whining at after midnight that there isn’t a Twitter update yet?

including in your article a link to a thread on the site, but failing to read the first post in it, in which someone is receiving text messages?

open your eyes

p.s. are you that sure that Dan included trying text messages?

his Twitter post, pictorially embedded in the article, only mentions calls

Tell you what is arrogant and condescending:

- publicly calling people nutters, which your calm collected friend seems to have managed to do

After all, what did I do wrong?

I pointed out what I saw as some errors or exaggerations in the article

- the network didn’t apparently completely die; I said text messages were still working

That gets contested to the point I’m very nearly accused of lying for saying it.

Yet the thread you pointed to on the giffgaff forum was started by someone who was still receiving text messages but couldn’t make or receive calls

Thus I stick with what I said yesterday, that apparently you didn’t read the place very carefully

And I suggest now that if your colleagues don’t believe me, perhaps they didn’t follow the link and read the thread either

All this is merely about some attnetion to detail, of course

But the customer service issues you are on about, those are mostly just attention to detail as well.

You had good points, which could have been more constructively made, but I think I agree with Richard who said it was more like a kid with the wrong jelly

Read Dan’s comment before yours. Properly.
As one might you say: “open your eyes”

What did I lie about? Trust me, I’m really, really not sniping.
I’d consider getting help if you’re under the impression that the interweb is out to get you; like I said – Dan’s experience was just that, DAN’S EXPERIENCE.

Please, take your ‘argument(s)’ up with either Dan himself or your therapist.

The post isn’t about the outage, the post is about the lack of information *as a whole*. Difficult to get your head around, I know. But go on, give it another go.

No info on Twitter?

Are you sure?

What’s wrong with this? – http://twitter.com/giffgaffoutages

- which includes a link to an announcement the next morning about this very matter

Very mature, James

By the way, just why did you delete a comment on that roaming thread from a couple months ago?

Didn’t like someone else spotting a fourfold increase in tariff on a new product from a firm you recommended?

I genuinely have no idea what you’re talking about.

1. To what part are you referencing re maturity?

2. What comment?

3. What post?

4. Which firm?

Good work using a new ID. Ben will just block that one too. You’re a troll. An ugly one at that.