Problems with 3 & O2 services since merger?

bugfreebob · 21-03-2015 10:37am #1

I don't use 3 or O2 myself, but I have been having problems calling several friends formerly on O2 since the merger. I typically get through to their voicemails at busy times although when I message them, they are not on voice calls. There is also a large number of complaints on the Three & O2 forums. Not sure how widespread the problems are - some of the problems seem to be specific to locations and times of day. The problems reported seem to include the following,

Calls going to O2/Three customers going to voicemail when line not busy
No O2/Three coverage where there was good coverage previously
Poor data speeds where there were good data speeds before
Problems logging into Three website and webtext from phone or web
Customer Care very poor and in denial of problems
Bills not arriving or being incorrect

Presumably the Coverage and Capacity problems are likely due to fact that Three Customers who were previously roaming on the Vodafone network(particularly for voice calls) are now overloading an already heavily loaded (re-branded) O2 network?

It would be interesting to get a cross section of votes from Three (inc former O2) customers who are experiencing any of these problems, but anyone can vote who is also having difficulty reaching these networks. Tesco & 48 users should also vote if they have experiences, as they are also using the Three network.

ZiabR · 24-03-2015 9:36am

I bought my first phone in 1998. A Nokia 3210 on O2. I was with them for 16 years, never moved networks until last Monday that it. The mobile phone signal was just terrible. I was getting no signal or 1 bar in my house where I used to get 3 bars. People were no longer able to contact me when I was at home so I moved to Vodafone on Monday and I have 5 bars signal now and I am paying no more.

I don't understand how my signal dropped so much when three took over, I thought three and o2 used the same network anyway.

bugfreebob · 25-03-2015 8:02pm

logik wrote: »

I bought my first phone in 1998. A Nokia 3210 on O2. I was with them for 16 years, never moved networks until last Monday that it. The mobile phone signal was just terrible. I was getting no signal or 1 bar in my house where I used to get 3 bars. People were no longer able to contact me when I was at home so I moved to Vodafone on Monday and I have 5 bars signal now and I am paying no more.

I don't understand how my signal dropped so much when three took over, I thought three and o2 used the same network anyway.

Three and former O2 do not use the same network. They are still effectively separate networks - just linked by a roaming agreement and a common brand. It seems like the Three customers have seriously overloaded the old O2 network in places, which was probably already suffering from lack of investment and lack of 4G. Whereas before the merger, the Three customers roamed onto the Vodafone network these customers are now roaming onto the old O2 network already full with former O2 customers. While Three have some 4G, it's not available to old O2 customers adding to the pressure on the old O2 2G & 3G networks. When a 3G network gets overloaded, the cells shrink in size which could explain why you were seeing fewer bars.

The Talk-to-Three boards are full of customers moaning about these problems and getting no satisfaction from the customer care desk in India - who seem to deny most of the problems. It doesn't look like there is any quick fix. You made the right decision to abandon ship. Judging by the poll results - these problems are not affecting all customers all of the time - but they are likely to affect all customers some of the time and some customers all of the time if they are unfortunate enough to live in heavily congested cells.

Popoutman · 01-04-2015 5:00pm

My personal handset is with Three - no change in service.

My work phone, is a blackberry, and it stopped receiving emails a few days ago - something that screwed up on the service provider end of things. Took ~1 week to resolve, which was a little awkward as I have to be able to receive pages via email on that device. We worked around it by changing the Blackberry to an iPhone..

Adrian4 · 01-04-2015 7:41pm

Webtexts from phone or web still not sending.

Priority Moments not working.

I think I will look for a replacement Sim Card.

bugfreebob · 01-04-2015 11:15pm

Adrian4 wrote: »

Webtexts from phone or web still not sending.

Priority Moments not working.

I think I will look for a replacement Sim Card.

I would recommend that you have a look at all the people who are having issues on the Talk-to-Three forum. Three seem to initially fob customers off by telling them to clean and change SIM's. There appears to be general consensus on the forum that most problems are in the networks and IT systems, and not in the SIMs. Last night's massive outage on the Three network was the last straw for several friends of mine.

Also, be careful if you sign up for a new SIM that you are not also signing up for a new contract, or you could end up locked in for a long period of time.

Strum · 06-04-2015 1:08am

logik wrote: »

I don't understand how my signal dropped so much when three took over,

I use the dongle and my connection is dropping 2-3 times a day now. Yesterday I couldn't connect for 2 hours. :mad:

B17G · 06-04-2015 4:42pm

Three network is down again this afternoon it seems.

http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/three-network-down-for-some-of-15m-customers-nationwide-31121744.html

Cherry Blossom · 06-04-2015 6:16pm

B17G wrote: »

Three network is down again this afternoon it seems.

http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/three-network-down-for-some-of-15m-customers-nationwide-31121744.html

Thanks for this, I thought my ancient phone had finally packed in. Oddly my broadband is three as well and it's working fine.

bugfreebob · 06-04-2015 6:39pm

B17G wrote: »

Three network is down again this afternoon it seems.

http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/three-network-down-for-some-of-15m-customers-nationwide-31121744.html

Everyone should keep an accurate record of these outages and how you are affected by them. Make sure to complain in writing. The frequency and severity of the outages should be serious enough to justify customers breaking contracts. It really helps that the issues are finally getting the attention of the national media.

_Kaiser_ · 06-04-2015 7:48pm

adrenalinjunkie wrote: »

Thanks for this, I thought my ancient phone had finally packed in. Oddly my broadband is three as well and it's working fine.

From what I've pieced together on the 3 Forum here, the issues seem to be affecting former-O2 customers. I'm on 3 Business and it's been fine today.. only found out there was an issue when I saw the news.

The much poorer signal quality (to the point of unusable a lot of the time) since they took over O2 is a much bigger issue, but as I just posted in another thread, options are limited - emobile/meteor have godawful backoffice support, (billing/support - I know this from experience unfortunately), Vodafone is overpriced with uncompetitive bundles, the rest are MVNO's (Tesco, 48)

Doesn't leave many options

B17G · 06-04-2015 10:05pm

adrenalinjunkie wrote: »

Thanks for this, I thought my ancient phone had finally packed in. Oddly my broadband is three as well and it's working fine.

Tried to send an SMS text just now and it failed. Same here with the broadband (ex O2), it's been working all the time.

Cherry Blossom · 06-04-2015 10:12pm

Yes i'm ex o2 on both phone and broadband, haven't checked my texts yet but calls are back working and i'm posting from my phone now - data back up and running just in the last few minutes.

coylemj · 06-04-2015 11:43pm

I'm ex-O2 and thought my SIM had packed up because the phone said it was disabled and I could only make emergency calls. Was just about to phone them when I spotted the Indo article on Twitter, it's back now.

Strum · 07-04-2015 1:08am

B17G wrote: »

Three network is down again this afternoon it seems.

http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/three-network-down-for-some-of-15m-customers-nationwide-31121744.html

Tell me about it, tearing my hair out now man, like being back in the old dial-up days, ffsnakes, progress in technology? Hahaha, arseho*es on dope more like. :mad:
Remember the changeover charter? something like "Don't worry - nothing will change in the merger between us sleezebag corporations, all will be resumed when we get around to it, in the meantime, suck it up and please do not use a hammer on your laptop"

Time for a different server I think. Grrr...:mad: :cool:

hfallada · 07-04-2015 1:14am

Honestly you cant say the standard of the service is horrific due to a single outage. My parents use o2 and they were used to network outages constantly on a Friday at 5-8pm up until about 5/6 years ago. Most Friday evenings they usually expected issues with making calls due to the network being over capacity.

bugfreebob · 07-04-2015 11:39pm

hfallada wrote: »

Honestly you cant say the standard of the service is horrific due to a single outage. My parents use o2 and they were used to network outages constantly on a Friday at 5-8pm up until about 5/6 years ago. Most Friday evenings they usually expected issues with making calls due to the network being over capacity.

It might be reasonable to tolerate a short localised outage on a few base-stations caused by something like lightning or power failure - but yesterdays outage impacted 2 Million customers and was widely reported in the National Media! Three have said it was a fault in a data center. However, standard practice for data centres is geographic diversity across more than one site. You wouldn't back up your PC to a cloud provider such as Google or Dropbox if you didn't think they had geographically diverse back-up data centres. It is inexcusable that a large mobile operator doesn't have this standard level of diversity in it's core platforms.

Also it wasn't just one outage. Yesterday may have been the biggest one - but this poll was started more than 2 weeks ago because many Three customers were already experiencing serious problems. The poll was already very much swinging towards the deterioration in service since the merger before everyone got hit with yesterdays big outage. Many customers are still experiencing problems even today - have a look at the Talk-to-Three board. Yesterdays big problem may have been fixed - but have they suddenly conjured up geographically diverse data centres to eliminate the risk of a repeat, and when are they going to fix all the other problems with the merger?

Trojan · 08-04-2015 12:12am

Three are losing 5 customers I know of: myself, my gf, my sister and my parents, all formerly o2 and all moving elsewhere (some to Vodafone, some to Meteor).

Just to clarify, this is nothing at all to do with Monday's outage, decision made well before that due to massive degradation in phone service over the past month (sounds like the cell shrinkage mentioned above).

I'm getting No Service about 75% of the time at home now where it was 5-10% before.

They're batting 5/5 in this small customer pool. Not sure what average total lifetime value of a mobile phone customer is, probably in the high 3 figures, maybe low 4 figures, and if that's happening everywhere it's going to hurt.

Strum · 08-04-2015 12:14am

Good post Bob. All I can say is that I've been using 02 for almost 6 years with no problems, except for a dodgy dongle once and they replaced it and gave me credit for the hassle.
Since this merger I've cursed a lot with all the recent outages. So much for "nothing will change" well if they don't get the finger out very soon I'm off, and I'm posting on behalf of a few others too.
02 used to send a message if there was going to be an outage for site upgrade or maintenance or whatever, and that was rare, but at least you knew instead of losing connection in the middle of an online project. BAH to three!

bugfreebob · 09-04-2015 12:34am

Strum wrote: »

Good post Bob. All I can say is that I've been using 02 for almost 6 years with no problems, except for a dodgy dongle once and they replaced it and gave me credit for the hassle.
Since this merger I've cursed a lot with all the recent outages. So much for "nothing will change" well if they don't get the finger out very soon I'm off, and I'm posting on behalf of a few others too.
02 used to send a message if there was going to be an outage for site upgrade or maintenance or whatever, and that was rare, but at least you knew instead of losing connection in the middle of an online project. BAH to three!

Thanks Strum. Three have to keep up the delusion that nothing has changed and that the problems are minor and only affecting a few customers. If they admit the true extent of the problems, everyone will be entitled to default on their contracts.

Any customer who had good service with O2 and who now has little or no service should have a very strong case under consumer law to break their contract. The customer entered into a contract with O2 in good faith, and may have had good service until the merger. However you would need to keep very good records, and give Three a number of reasonable opportunities to fix the problems before the case would stand up.

I don't believe they will be able to fix these problems any time soon - because they won't want to invest in expanding the old O2 network, and they can't move all O2 customers onto the old Three network yet until it is expanded and built out at the O2/eircom site-share locations. Moving the customers prematurely to the old Three network and plans would definitely give the customers grounds to break contracts. They also won't want to lose the revenue from migrating O2 customers on high tariffs to Three contracts with lower tariffs. Instead they will probably need to establish a glide path to increase the Three prices to closer to O2 levels before they do widespread migration.

zombieHanalei · 09-04-2015 12:14pm

Switched from O2 to Vodafone in January, my gut feeling was the expanded network would operate using the Three model instead of the O2 model. They made a big song and dance over acquiring O2's customer care call centres but from what I can see they are basically being made to operate exactly like Three's customer care (switch your phone off and on again, blame a faulty sim, promise call backs that never come, etc.) In the long run this merger will be the best thing that ever happened to Meteor and Vodafone.

I seem to have regular issues calling former O2 customers now, calls going straight to voicemail and messages not being received straight away and so on, never used to happen before March.

My experience on Three about four years ago ended due to clueless customer care combined with a network that gave me the impression that it was operating over capacity. If they can barely handle 8 or 9% of the market then I'd be very skeptical to say the least regarding their ability to handle an extra 1.5M customers.

bugfreebob · 09-04-2015 11:53pm

The latest problem reported on the Talk to Three forum is worth taking note of. It results in mis-routing of Freephone type numbers for former O2 customers. For example the Permanent TSB Open24 number routes to Irish Water!

It is interesting because it appears to be affecting all former O2 customers irrespective of location, and is repeatable. This is important for anyone trying to build a case for breaking contract. Also, each 1890 call that is mis-routed is also being charged out-of-bundle - so there is a definite case of over-charging, which is unquestionably a reason to demand a refund. Everyone who is trying to get out of contract with Three should make a number of these types of calls and log the details. When combined with the big outage on Monday, and all the other issues, this could be important evidence of the failure of Three to provide the service that they have been contracted to provide.

It looks like Three have corrupted their database of Freephone routing - perhaps during the merger, or maybe during Monday's outage?

Undoubtedly, Three support in India will again tell customers that they mustn't be cleaning their SIM cards hard enough in Eire, and that nothing has changed and there are no problems!

bugfreebob · 13-04-2015 6:55pm

Has anyone succeeded in getting any refunds yet for the service issues, or has anyone managed to break contracts due to the loss of service in areas and at times where they previously had it?

Interesting to see that eircom are giving refunds for loss of service during last years severe storms. If anything, storms could be covered under Force Majeure clauses and were obviously outside the control of the company, and yet customers are getting refunds. By comparison the O2/Three outages and service issues are clearly within the control of Three - and Comreg should force Three to give a big refund and allow early exit from contracts.

It is vital that everyone with problems logs them as "Formal Complaints" with Three and follows up with Comreg afterwards when they are not sorted within a reasonable period.

tv3tg4 · 15-04-2015 7:42pm

They admit that only 95% of my webtexts are delivered = but have not intention of bothering to fix the fault.

The text based customer care responses leave a lot to be desired.

My advice is keep to your old 02 price plans -

_Kaiser_ · 15-04-2015 10:18pm

I'm on their Sim Only Business Plan which up until 2 months ago was perfect.. since they "merged" the networks though, speed and signal levels have gone to shyte and while they're well aware of the issues (you only need to have a look at their Talk To forum here), there's no resolution forthcoming.

I'm seriously considering switching networks, but realistically my options are eircom (meteor/emobile) or Vodafone

- I've been with eircom's offering before and had massive billing issues to the point of having to get Comreg and eircom Corporate involved twice
- Vodafone is overpriced and the bundles are poor IMO (especially their data!!)

Just wondering what others who've found themselves in this situation lately are doing?

Nickindublin · 16-04-2015 7:00pm

Kaiser we have 6 active lines with o2/Three.... Living in Dublin and have not noticed to much issues except for the outage on the Bank Holiday and one of our numbers had issues sending texts one day. All contracts are up inside the next 6 months so i am willing to wait and see what the service is like from the network and customer service. I would think that there was no real investment from Telefonica in o2 for the last number of years.

As for porting to Vodafone or Emobile i agree with what you said.

Bob24 · 21-04-2015 5:23pm

_Kaiser_ wrote: »

I'm on their Sim Only Business Plan which up until 2 months ago was perfect.. since they "merged" the networks though, speed and signal levels have gone to shyte and while they're well aware of the issues (you only need to have a look at their Talk To forum here), there's no resolution forthcoming.

I'm seriously considering switching networks, but realistically my options are eircom (meteor/emobile) or Vodafone

- I've been with eircom's offering before and had massive billing issues to the point of having to get Comreg and eircom Corporate involved twice
- Vodafone is overpriced and the bundles are poor IMO (especially their data!!)

Just wondering what others who've found themselves in this situation lately are doing?

Interestingly I am not too keen on moving to Eircom/Vodafone for the exact same reasons as yours.

Also had billing issues with Meteor - their customer service was awful and kept assuming they were right without trying to understand my bills whereas I was raising genuine issues (I wasted hours trying to explain the issue to them and eventually also had to go to ComReg for them to look into the issue seriously and admit their mistakes).

And as I am am a heavy enough data user (not crazy - 10gigs per month), Vodafone doesn't have an sim only deal that works for me.

So while the data service on Three is not great - I am not too sure what other options I have.

bugfreebob · 27-04-2015 8:10pm

Three Ireland network seems to have sat down again this evening. According to posts on Talk-to-Three, a large proportion of both former O2 and Three native customers seem to be off the air. Widely reported in the National Media - so this should help to build the case for anyone trying to escape from a contract.

http://www.siliconrepublic.com/comms/item/41785-three-s-network-in-ireland

bugfreebob · 27-04-2015 8:18pm

bugfreebob wrote: »

Three Ireland network seems to have sat down again this evening. According to posts on Talk-to-Three, a large proportion of both former O2 and Three native customers seem to be off the air. Widely reported in the National Media - so this should help to build the case for anyone trying to escape from a contract.

http://www.siliconrepublic.com/comms/item/41785-three-s-network-in-ireland

Of course, maybe they are just celebrating Morse Code Day? They issued this Tweet this morning

https://twitter.com/ThreeCare/status/592599131820023810

Adrian4 · 27-04-2015 9:04pm

I rang them again last week - It keeps looking for an authentication code when I send webtexts.

Rubberchikken · 27-04-2015 9:11pm

Thought i was the only one!
On 3 past year. Usually fine. Since merger, i'm seriously considering moving to vodaphone.
My daughter was with O2. Never had a bother. Great reception etc. since the merger, it's been mothing but poor/no service etc.

Very disappointed with things in this house:(

Problems with 3 & O2 services since merger?

Problems with O2/Three services since Merger (inc, coverage, data speed etc)? 47 votes

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