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midlifecrisis

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Park assist is quite frankly for the emasculated!

Please tell me that they're not in the Levante or Ghibli... Or the Alfieri...
 

midlifecrisis

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My rant of the month is directed at Three, the Mobile telephone company.
Now that I'm in the Surrey hills, their service is poor despite saying good coverage. I sent them a few coverage reports via their 3 app and they sent me emails/texts to say that their engineers are looking into the issue. Ira was on 3 too, and so I raised the issue on hers too. Again text messages received.
Spin on a month with still no coverage at home or outside within the village, I phone up on my works phone and get through to the Indian call centre.
Absolutely useless, they told me to download an app so that I can make phone calls via my home wifi.
Great but what if I leave home and am not in the range. That stumped them! 'It works off wifi, it uses wifi'
I said that since you cannot give me a service I want to leave early. They said OK but it'll cost you, why I said. It's in the contract. I said, but you cannot provide me with a service so why should I pay? Silence.... I asked for someone with a brain and was reasonable to talk to rather than a battery chicken in a call centre aka The Supervisor.
They seemed sympathetic but when I mentioned not paying to leave them he changed and said that I'd have to speak to another agent...
By this time I'm cooked a roast dinner one handed and it was ready to be served, he said he'd call back but had given me PAC numbers for both of our phones.

We've now moved to other providers and I'm still waiting for the call back. Direct debits have been cancelled...

The lesson here is not to consider any UK service company that uses a foreign call centre such as Three do. They make speak English but their communication skills are appalling.
Admiral Insurance use Welsh people but they're the exception. They are very good.
 

bigbob

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My rant of the month is directed at Three, the Mobile telephone company.
Now that I'm in the Surrey hills, their service is poor despite saying good coverage. I sent them a few coverage reports via their 3 app and they sent me emails/texts to say that their engineers are looking into the issue. Ira was on 3 too, and so I raised the issue on hers too. Again text messages received.
Spin on a month with still no coverage at home or outside within the village, I phone up on my works phone and get through to the Indian call centre.
Absolutely useless, they told me to download an app so that I can make phone calls via my home wifi.
Great but what if I leave home and am not in the range. That stumped them! 'It works off wifi, it uses wifi'
I said that since you cannot give me a service I want to leave early. They said OK but it'll cost you, why I said. It's in the contract. I said, but you cannot provide me with a service so why should I pay? Silence.... I asked for someone with a brain and was reasonable to talk to rather than a battery chicken in a call centre aka The Supervisor.
They seemed sympathetic but when I mentioned not paying to leave them he changed and said that I'd have to speak to another agent...
By this time I'm cooked a roast dinner one handed and it was ready to be served, he said he'd call back but had given me PAC numbers for both of our phones.

We've now moved to other providers and I'm still waiting for the call back. Direct debits have been cancelled...

The lesson here is not to consider any UK service company that uses a foreign call centre such as Three do. They make speak English but their communication skills are appalling.
Admiral Insurance use Welsh people but they're the exception. They are very good.

What's the business model for Three? What's wrong with EE, O2 or V who surely must have better coverage? Sorry if it sounds blunt but what do they offer to get people in in the first place?
 
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Totally agree about foreign call centres. They are dreadful
eg an Indian or similar will come on the line and claim his name is Martin or some such. Now that may well be true but his accent and communication skills give the lie to it all.
Heard recently that Steve Gibson (a local lad) and Chairman of MFC and business owner (Bulkhall) is moving his business call centre to Egypt of all places. I know not why
 
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Yes you are of course correct but I think MLC moved to Surrey and this is when he experienced problems. So cheap is not always better
 

midlifecrisis

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To clarify. I moved to Surrey and I was on a sim only contract as my phone is that good, I didn't want an iPhone or Samsung so opted for them when I was living in the first world.
 

bigbob

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to clarify. I moved to surrey and i was on a sim only contract as my phone is that good, i didn't want an iphone or samsung so opted for them when i was living in the first world.

lol. I just have the family on shared data sim only contracts and buy the handsets myself. Market has changed IMHO.
 

CatmanV2

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Have to say, Martin, while I don't necessarily like off shore call centres, I don't think in this situation it's really has much bearing on the issue.

I'm very sure that three know damned well what their coverage is, and the App (and the promises to have an engineer look at the issue, and the call centre being their to provide another layer of customer insulation) is pretty much an utter waste of time for you. For them, there will always be a percentage of people who get an improved service after they've raised the complaint, and will think they had an impact (post hoc, ergo propter hoc). Any improvement will be done in line with whatever schedule of improvement they have (unless there genuinely is a fault, in which case the call centre probably still won't know)

$0.02 and I've not been in mobile comms for a while :)

C
 

MrMickS

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I did some work with mobile companies in the 90s around coverage and the figures they use on advertising. When they say 95% coverage they don't mean land area, they mean people in their home location. They use census data overlaid with mast coverage to compute this. They then have a further qualifier about outdoor and indoor coverage. They generally post the most optimistic figures.

I'm on EE and, whilst I have reasonable signal outdoors at home, indoors I have to use the WiFi calling feature as otherwise its barely usable.

What bugs the heck out of me is that you still can't have a conversation for the length of the train journey from Leeds to York without hitting a dead area. With the concentration on home locations mobile phone coverage isn't really concerned with having coverage on the move but rather where other people live. Less than ideal and a bit of a con.
 

jasst

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When my other half moved out 3 years ago she had just taken out a new contract with Vodafone, where she moved to the only coverage is with EE, and Vodafone refused to cancel her contract so she had to pay for two contracts till the Vodafone one expired, but what really annoyed me was when on holiday in Crete last year we did a trip into the wilds ,up the highest mountain in the middle of nowhere and we had a 4g phone signal!! :frusty5:
 

midlifecrisis

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Why do women, or any other person, think that they can legally drive with a poodle on their lap?

And secondly, why would anyone think that they are safe being passenger in a car that is being driven with a poodle on the lap of the driver!

A white Mini this morning going through Gomshall at 0730 this morning...
 

Felonious Crud

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Why do women, or any other person, think that they can legally drive with a poodle on their lap?

And secondly, why would anyone think that they are safe being passenger in a car that is being driven with a poodle on the lap of the driver!

A white Mini this morning going through Gomshall at 0730 this morning...

Oh, that's easy. It's because they're not very clever.

The driver, that is, not the poodle. I'd bet good money the poodle's far smarter.
 

midlifecrisis

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My next Rant involves cyclists!

WHY oh why oh why do some people overtake cyclists so s l o w l y...

When I overtake cyclists or any other car, i do it with plenty of throttle giving them plenty of room so as not to cause them issues with turbulence etc. The action is done swiftly and safely, so that my exposure to danger is minimal as I'm on the wrong side of the road! Yet so many times I've seen a clear road ahead but some doddery driver unable to drop it down a gear or two, accelerate and overtake and they have a huge tailback or impatient cars behind them. It's not the lycra louts job to pull over but when i cycled to work (no lycra!) quite a few drivers would tailgate me and yet when I waved them through or joined the cyclepath they still stuck behind me!

W-anchors!
 
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