3 Mobile

[BertR00t]

Sounds completely bizarre.

So on 3 (where you live) and what happens if you try and phone a vodafone mobile, and what happens if somebody tries the call the other way around?

Is that a big fault, or something they won't / can't do anything about?

Three have been told about the issue but don't seem too concerned even though they are losing a lot of business from everybody who now knows about the issue.

To confirm if Vodafone calls 3 then it is as though you are ringing a dead line, i.e. call fails immediately. If you send a text from Vodafone to 3 then it never arrives. The other way round works apparently so a text or call from 3 to Vodafone works.

Am in Lytham by the way.

 

[technodup]

Anybody on a 3 Contract? Currently on O2 which I've found to be fine. Never yet needed to hassle the call centre. I've got a 3 Mobile Dongle which I've used in the South West OK

You don't need a dongle if you get their all in tariff (forget the name), you can use your phone as a mobile access point. I don't understand how it works but I've got it for Vodafone and it works perfectly anywhere there's a phone signal.

 

[Neil]

Anybody on a 3 Contract? Currently on O2 which I've found to be fine. Never yet needed to hassle the call centre. I've got a 3 Mobile Dongle which I've used in the South West OK

You don't need a dongle if you get their all in tariff (forget the name), you can use your phone as a mobile access point. I don't understand how it works but I've got it for Vodafone and it works perfectly anywhere there's a phone signal.

Many smartphones have WiFi chipsets, and can act as ad-hoc WiFi hotspots (either with the native software, or apps) - dunno whether any can actually masquerade as infrastructure mode access points for their 3G connectivity.

 

[Easy_Rider]

You get what you pay for, 3 are cheap because they have crap reception, Vodafone probably have the best overall UK reception so they charge more for that.

 

[djoptix]

I'm on 3 and I find it excellent (I'm in Bristol btw). I tether my laptop over my phone and I generally get a 2mbps connection. Reported signal on my phone (a flashed ZTE Blade I bought off John, incidentally!) is certainly nowhere near as good as when I was on o2, but it's pretty rare that I actually can't make a call. Most commonly it's inside large metal buildings that signal is poor. Having said that, even when the phone says I have no bars, it's still happy to send and receive data to my laptop, albeit a bit slowly.

I have found coverage to be very good on the motorway network - a couple of weeks ago I travelled from Bristol to Preston and was on the internet pretty much the whole way there with very few dropouts. However, coverage on the railway network isn't so good - I regularly travel to the North East with work and when I'm on a Virgin train at full pelt, you can pretty much guarantee there will be almost no signal.

I've been really impressed with the tethering. I'm on a contract which is £10/mo for 300 mins, 1000 texts and 1GB data. And my phone cost £75. So IMHO you don't get what you pay for

I was on 3 back in the dim distant past when they were pushing video calling - I had the phone pictured below. Back then the signal was really awful and the customer service was even worse. They're perhaps not the best network but 3 do seem to have come a long way since then.