Are Three really that bad?

KrakityJones

First off sorry if this is the wrong place to ask this.

It's hard to judge a mobile phone provider by online reviews because everyone seems to have bad things to say about every provider. Maybe it's down to people with good experiences not bothering to write reviews.

Anyway was looking at changing the phone/plan and Three seem good price wise, but my god they get slated left right and centre.

Over the years (for personal and business phones) I've swopped and changed a good bit. Vodafone had good coverage and service but their accounts dept were all over the shop. O2 were good all round but gone now. Tesco were ok coverage but customer service was poor, Eir/Meteor I found had good service but poor coverage etc. IE if I was the "argh I'm angry I'm going to write a slating review" type I'd have rated all of them badly at some point. Three are the only ones I've not tried but I'm wary.

Anyway - for those who have used three in the last year or so - are they really as bad as people make out, or are they no better/worse than others out there?

Thanks

ED E

How they are generally doesnt matter, how are they where you live/work matters.

Get a sim, its E20, test and find out.

Davidth88

Outside the pale they are still quite poor. Ok for phone signal but internet speeds are a total joke.

DaDerv

I'm in Galway and it's OK. I work in the city and its good and live rural and I've 4g at times. Always H+.

TheDriver

I have been with Tesco and o2 and colleagues on 3. We all had same issues wit poor data, no reception etc. VF is best but pricey, meteor good for value with decent speeds.

satguy

If you travel overseas expect huge bills even if you only turn on a weather app or WhatsApp, or indeed any app at all for even a few seconds.

JaMarcusHustle

I moved from Three as reception was patchy around Grand Canal Dock and Sandyford, two areas I'd be expecting perfect signal. Moved to Vodafone a couple of months ago and questioning myself as to why it took me so long to move.

KrakityJones

ED E wrote: »

How they are generally doesnt matter, how are they where you live/work matters.

Get a sim, its E20, test and find out.

I got caught with that line of thinking before - all well and good to try a sim for a month or so on prepay but their bill pay team/service could be totally different. Eg Vodafone - great coverage and signal overall, but if you have any kind of an accounts query or billing problem they can be impossible to deal with. Dealt with them for a decent enough sized company account (approx 70 mobiles total) and I kid you not every single month there was some problem with the billing for pretty much each phone on the account. A sim card test would show great coverage/data speed etc but I wouldn't go bill pay with Vodafone if they were paying me (because they'd probably get the amount wrong)

Anyway cheers for the replies, I'm starting to think maybe it is a case that (signal and coverage aside) all the providers are roughly the same so.

ED E

I never go Billpay with any mobile provider, customer care is rarely an issue. Just tweet them if something goes really tits up.

cal60

Until very recently I have been with Esat Digifone ->O2->Three for must be nigh on twenty years - recently changed to iD which operates off the three network. I don't use the phone much for internet nor do I travel around all that much but in general I have found coverage to be OK. I had a Moto G4 for a while and with iD I found I could regularly get 4G. So like the OP I couldn't say that the very negative reviews three seems to get tally with my experience.

The only issue I really had , if you could call it an issue, is that if I put the phone down on the mantlepiece in the living room it oftens locks into the UK networks.

I am in the Monaghan area and being "outside the Pale" , so to speak, I am of course used to finding that we are not always the first to be considered when it comes to infrastructure/broadband etc. There was a period in the '60s when RTE television was not available in this area ( we didn't mind as we had all the British channels) and even now it seems to be the channel most likely to to break up when weather conditions are not great.:D

tictac18g

Three network provides "All You Can Eat Everything" like 60Gb date, it sounds like tasty.
It turned out the network speed was around 1~3Mbit/s, It made "round buffering" while I watch youtube with high resolution.
I canceled it after 3 month later

My meteor shows around 7~8Mbit/s, it is much better than the three,
but it keeps losing network connection, guess it is from the poor reception.
While vodafone shows around 10Mbit/s, I can't complain it except the pricey.

I take advantage of vodafone for my primary, phone and meteor for backup, tablet.
I'm talking about 4G network and network data speed only.