Mike Wilks' Blog

Even though our exchange is due to be upgraded for FTTC in March there is no plan for it to come to our cabinet. Lots of new FTTC cabinets have appeared but our local PCP remains untouched. According to my ISP there is no planned date for our cabinet. This is the small print in the Infinity publicity – not all cabinets get it.

So we are stuck on 2Mbs ADSL and a Three tethered phone on the One Plan which is increasingly putting the slow ADSL out of use. My record from the phone is now 9.1Mbs on the bedroom window sill.

Just had an interesting conversation with Three Customer Service. I am in the last month of my contract so I called to see what they might be prepared to offer me. The short answer appears to be nothing.

As soon as I said I was happy to stay on SIM only they completely lost interest. I wanted to stay on the One Plan and they suggested that £25 a month is the best they can do. I pointed out that I was happy to commit for another contract period but no dice. I also explained I could sign up for a new contract and get cashback which is a apparently a “win win” deal. I don’t think the CS operative appreciated that it is Three who pays the cash to affiliates.

Anyway if Three want to improve on their £25 a month and lock me up as a customer for a while I will listen. In the meantime I am off to have a look at Giffgaff.

UPDATE: Three have responded on Twitter with the same message as before. £25 is the right price and the best deal on the market. Well it is for now ….

I never understood why they withdrew the 12 months Sim Only One Plan but I suspect because it doesn’t exist anymore there is nothing to upgrade to.

I’ve upgraded my mobile to a Galaxy Nexus which has HSPA+. I now get much better speeds on Three that put my ADSL to shame.

The Kogan tablet is £119 plus delivery on their website but if you are patient you can get it £30 cheaper on eBay.

For a 7″ Android 2.3.3 Tablet with a capacitive screen that is stupidly good value.  I’ve rooted mine to play about with Android but even on the stock ROM it is an awesome bit of cheap kit.

Other than a bit of trouble getting the SD card to lock in place and limited battery life I have no complaints.

Carbonite is a great product for backing up your Mac. Except it seems if you have upgraded to Lion. Two days after Lion was released I got an email from Carbonite telling me that their product is not compatible. What’s worse is it looks like it is working but apparently it isn’t. I thought this is what Developer Previews were for, apparently not.

So either they didn’t check with the Developer Preview which seems like the behaviour of a less than serious outfit. OR they knew it didn’t work and didn’t tell their paying customers until after the release of Lion when many off us had already upgraded. Neither of which shows them in a particularly good light in my view.

They even have a nice FAQ page telling the world how they were caught out. Crashplan however seems to be ok as their blog page says, maybe it is time to switch.

Having been a Spotify Premium subscriber for a long time I have quite a few invites. These were pointless until the recent US launch but now seem to be in demand. I’m not going to go the ebay route (although I won’t turn stuff down!) but I will give these out.

DM me on twitter (@mikewilks) if you want one.

A little follow-up to my previous post. Having put my tethered Three phone in the loft for a bit I can really get it to out perform the home broadband. Here’s a couple of results.

First the home ADSL (provided by ADSL24 reselling Be There Unlimited):

and then the Three mobile in the loft

Other than the latency the Three result is much better. A strange state of affairs when my mobile is faster than my home broadband, hopefully the FTTC / FTTP rollout gets here soon to fix the situation. In the meantime Three it is …..

The hero of this little piece is Three and the Villain BT.

Three seem to have done something to the transmitter covering our house as I am now getting consistently better speeds than I did before. The signal is dodgy and only works in the front of the house but even so now manages to consistently give 2.5 to 3Mbs. This is faster than my home ADSL connection which achieves about 2.3Mbs even after reducing the SNR to make it faster but unstable. That clever piece of SNR trickery is made possible by our ISP ADSL24 who I am very happy with, they offer truly unlimited internet on the Premium Home product but are constrained by the infrastructure serving our house.

There is potential for BT to reverse the situation when Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) finally gets rolled out to our exchange, they have announced that for next year. That said in the cabinet specific data that leaked earlier this year our cabinet ominously had no FTTC besides it. This might just be because we are on a new estate or it might be (fingers crossed) that the estate with all its underground ducting is being saved for the faster Fibre to the Premises (FTTP).

In the meantime I find myself increasingly increasingly tethering my mobile at home and using this as my primary connection. I cannot recommend Three’s One Plan highly enough, it really is unlimited. I spend so much time in hotels that this plan made perfect sense and allowed me to cancel my Orange data card saving me £28 a month. Previously Orange came closest to properly unlimited data with a plan they offered briefly allowing “unlimited” off peak downloads, it was limited to 5Gb a day.

I have to put up with a less than perfect mobile signal in some parts of the house but when it does have a signal it is faster than my home broadband.

I’ve had two sim-only contracts from Vodafone over the last year, one used by me and one by my fiancée. The end of the year is up so I’ve been looking around for better deals. I spend most of my time using data rather than calls and spend a lot of time in hotels. I am absolutely sold on the idea of the new Three One Plan with properly unlimited data but for the other number we genuinely were looking to get the best offer possible.

When I called to request a PAC for my number all was OK until I asked about offers on the other number. The two deals offered were both worse than staying on a rolling 30 day contract.

When the cancellation department called prior to issuing the PAC code things got worse. I had signed up for 900 minutes, 3000 texts and 1Gb data. The CS rep who called seemed to be under the impression I had 1200 minutes but only 500MB. I was leaving anyway but this doesn’t help. Confirming by looking at my online account I believe I am correct.

For my fiancée’s number we genuinely would stay for a decent offer but Vodafone really need to step up their game to regain confidence with me. We’ve contacted @VodafoneUKDeals so let’s see how we get on.

UPDATE:

Having got a call from the web relations team things seem to have got much better. Upgrade offer for my financée’s number accepted. 900 minutes, 3000 texts, 1Gb data for £15 a month (for 9 months then £30 for the remaining 3).

I recently spend a week in the US. On previous trips I have done without mobile data access and relied on hot spots. This year I decided to splash out and get a US SIM with data access. I chose MrSimCard basically because he appears to be the only game in town. The SIM I went with was $99 with unlimited web, phone and texts . This is actually a resold Simple Mobile SIM so you are paying a premium of around $40 (Simple sell it for $60). That said it is unclear to me whether you can actually get this delivered direct from Simple outside of the US or whether you could actually walk into a reseller in the US and buy without a US address. Either way I felt like I got reasonable value from MrSimCard.

Activation was a quick call to MrSimCard who activated the SIM on the phone and read the number to me. When we arrived the setup was easy, and we had working data and voice/text in the cab from the airport. Before I left I swapped a few emails with MrSimCard because I was concerned over whether the data was actually unlimited. I was assured it was and this seemed to be true. While in the US I managed to rack up over 2Gb of data mostly in podcasts but quite heavy browsing, foursquare and lots of usage of google maps. I never had an issue with signal or download speed but then we were mostly in Manhattan with the trips to Queens (to see the Mets), Bronx and New Jersey. The SIM reports it is on the Simple network but I understand this is the T-Mobile one underneath.

As a quick side note having phone access allowed us to make use of the Localphone calling card feature which seems to have better call quality than using VOIP (certainly over a 3G network). Localphone was pretty good for the whole week. Incoming calls to my UK based number allowed people at home to call me with me only paying the 1p/min divert costs to my US mobile. Outgoing calls works pretty well too, the only slight niggle was that one of the setup US numbers did not forward correctly to a mobile I was trying to call in the UK but I was able to call it through the calling card access number.

Skype on the other hand was a different story. I have credit in my Skype account from before I knew better. Skype have an access number system called Skype to Go which I decided to give a try. In contrast to my experience with Localphone the call quality was horrible. DTMF was so patchy that I managed to lock-out my work voicemail because while it seemed to get the number I was dialling it clearly didn’t pass the PIN correctly. I had similar DTMF problems trying to use my creditcard phone service.

In conclusion the SIM from MrSimCard in combination with Localphone was a great combination albeit a little expensive for the SIM itself. Skype was a huge disappointment, this along with the refusal to create a decent Android app means I am pretty much done with Skype – besides which I find Localphone much better.

I have no relationship with any of the companies mentioned here other than customer.