Ovivo New Network. 200 minutes 200 Texts Free indefinitely.

CaptainHaddock_2

Mark300zx wrote: »

So what is the general opinion of this service, I am pondering about it as I am a low user and it could save me some cash, how intrusive are the adverts?

I find them not an issue - I find that I can just hit the "back" button in the browser and I land on the page I actually wanted. And for all other uses of the phone - mail, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc - the ads are irrelevant.

Wammer wrote: »

I have very rarely been able to connect at work recently. I can sometimes get emails to download in Gmail, but can't open any pages in news apps. \i don't often use the phone at home and when I do it's on wifi. I've just tried it on 3G and got a good signal. However on long journeys it has let me down when I have been trying to use any sat nav apps.

I had exactly the same issues a couple of weeks ago, but they seem to have disappeared. When I phoned Customer Service they did say that "a small number of customers" had a problem and that Vodafone thought they knew what the problem was. For me, the problems went away after four days but it seems others are still experiencing problems.

I happen to have two Ovivo SIMs, in two different brands of device, and while I never had problems on both of them at the same time, I did experience the problem above on both at one time or another - so I would wager it is not device-specific.

I did find that when I was having problems in one part of the country and travelled somewhere else, everything would be fine in the new area.

Silk

NonGeographicalMan wrote: »

Lastly I should clarify that the main reason I was finally expelled from Ovivo was seemingly because after several days in a row of having no internet access, whilst I also had a temporary problem on home fixed line broadband caused by a router configuration issue, and after trying to report these issues to Ovivo customer service (without success) over previous days I finally decided that enough was enough. So on a Sunday morning when I had no internet service at all and was probably 30 miles away from any working web cafe I also found Ovivo's customer services closed all day so in my frustration decided to call Ovivo's CEO, Dariush Zand on his mobile number that he had chosen to give me in a previous email to me as a customer some months earlier.

:rotfl::rotfl::rotfl:
So on a Sunday morning 30 miles away from civilisation and finding no internet with the offices shut you decide to call the CEO at home !!!!!! :rotfl:

No doubt you rang him using the free minutes he gave you too :T

want_to_save

why on earth would you call the ceo on a sunday morning and expect some help!!! that is ridiculous!!! its a cheap service and yet you expect 24/7 support sorry but no way should you have called him on a weekend... how would you like it if you had a work related call from a stranger on a weekend.

NonGeographicalMan

Silk wrote: »

:rotfl::rotfl::rotfl:
So on a Sunday morning 30 miles away from civilisation and finding no internet with the offices shut you decide to call the CEO at home !!!!!! :rotfl:

I have previously established through one of his earliest and nicest customer service persons (Libbie), who is quite possibly no longer there following the introduction of the new Ryanair like methods of dealing with unhappy customers and the seemingly tough new Head of Customer Operations (Mark Howson), that Dariush Zand is also Ovivo's "Chief Operating Officer" and that he is also "very hands on" (according to Libbie) in relation to all technical issues regarding the company's network in that role. So as far as I was concerned Dariush was therefore directly responsible for resolving the failure that was preventing my internet service working and for choosing not to remove the redirect to the now.ovivomobile.com web page every so many Mb until such time as the advertisement web server was fixed.

Since the failure had been ongoing since the previous Wednesday or Thursday and the company had not been upfront about the failure with most customers affected by it I felt I had every possible reason to try to hold the Chief Operating Officer (who is also the CEO) directly to account for these failings. Also one of the things I originally liked about Ovivo was that it was largely under the control of one person and not a big faceless totally out of control juggernaut as Vodafone and Three most definitely are. I didn't know then that the CEO would in fact turn out to be someone who would seemingly regard a customer who complained proactively about a repeated service outage by the company as being some kind of annoying under paying !!!!!!!!!! that he would cheerfully make walk the plank without a second thought rather than actually simply deal with the problem being brought to his attention. And I am sure I have read before in American management school talk that a customer's most difficult and demanding customers are usually those who they can actually learn the most from in terms of providing a service that the company's average customer (the sort who would normally just leave rather than writing a long and complicated letter of complaint if they were not happy) can also be happy about.

If you read on up on who Ovivo's directors are (various non-executives from the telecoms world, some of whom are past masters in the mysterious corporate art of Outsourcery) it is fairly obvious that the company is a sort of near virtual office and extremely lean and that the customer service team are the only substantial part of the workforce. Any policy or operational issues day to day nearly all fall back to Dariush himself. All of the real network itself comes from Vodafone for calls and texts and initital network data access plus any third party partner for the backbone data support on to the internet at large (if Vodafone is not used for that).

He is the CEO but actually of a fairly small operation (although needing quite a lot of financial backing due to the mainly free component and the big payback from advertisers etc probably not materialising till down the road but the costs of minutes and data all arising now). But obviously his extensive previous CV within the Vodafone group has given him the right contacts and experience to successfully bring this together. Most of this CV at the Vodafone was on his Linked In entry at http://www.linkedin.com/in/dariushzand, although I see that I can now not read all of it, either because he has blocked my ability to do so or because he has removed it from more general view.

The other people Linked In shows that you may also be interested in under Dariush's entry reveals most of the other Board Directors as does this press release at www.ovivomobile.com/news/press-release-ovivo-mobile-appoints-three-non-exec-directors/

No doubt you rang him using the free minutes he gave you too :T

I think I may actually have tried calling him on my Post Office Homephone line as I get free calls up to an hour to mobiles ate the weekend. Hard to remember now. I certainly sent him a free text after the call from the Ovivo Mobile.

But anyhow surely you aren't saying that just because the service is part funded by advertising that I should expect it not to work properly (that would be like saying you can expect a Ryanair plane to crash just because the ticket is cheap)? I must actually have spent £50 or so of my own cash during the time I was with Ovivo as well as introducing two friends/relatives by the time they had started charging £20 up front. So its not like I have had everything for free.

If you look at what Tesco Mobile is offering on SIM Only for £10 per month (1Gb and 500 minutes) or for £12.50 per month (2Gb and 750 minutes) or what Virgin Mobile offers for £15 per month (so called Unlimited which is actually 3,000 minutes plus 3.5Gb at full 3G speed and then run on above 3.5Gb at 2.5G speed or something like that) then I don't think that 150 minutes and a rather dubiously reliable 0.5Mb of data extensively punctuated and interfered with by annoying adverts could possibly have been worth more than £5 per month at the outside. That is even if we had been asked to pay for it.

want_to_save

nope I am not saying that you have every right to complain however I think it is unreasonable to contact someone on their mobile on a sunday. Ok more fool him to give you his mobile number but that's just my opinion...

I have used ovivo for a month and yep data is slow but calls and texts fine am a light user and tbh you get what you pay for.

NonGeographicalMan

want_to_save wrote: »

nope I am not saying that you have every right to complain however I think it is unreasonable to contact someone on their mobile on a sunday. Ok more fool him to give you his mobile number but that's just my opinion...

Well I had reached a stage with the advertising messing up web browsing that I was really annoyed about it. Not coming up with a fix after several days was just not on.

At the end of the day I only reached the point of calling the CEO because the company was being so repeatedly evasive about what the problem was and when they planned to fix it and the service was also down when I desperately needed it most (when I called the CEO on his mobile I had no other means to access the internet the time and option of ringing Directory Enquires at a pound or two a shot to make contact about the technical problems I had). If the CEO thinks he can afford to just burn founder customers who chase him assiduously about real failings in the service (which ought to just chivvy him in to sorting the problem out pronto) then that is his gamble.

I will only say that a former passionate brand advocate for the company can also become a pretty passionate brand disadvocate when treated in this manner.

I have used ovivo for a month and yep data is slow but calls and texts fine am a light user and tbh you get what you pay for.

I am also a light user in a whole month context but on the days I use the service I might use it continuously for up to an hour and find it pretty unacceptable to have a mobile internet access service I simply can't count on to work when I need it to. Also the forced Ovivo ads pages had ramped up to a level where they had really crossed the pain threshold. And all of the forced advertising was general junk in no way tailored to my pattern of previous web page browsing.

It seems some of the rest of you are prepared to suffer a data service that is available only if and when they (Ovivo) feel like providing it in order to save yourself a five or tenner a month.

alanwsg

I too was a fan of Ovivo and have now abandoned it (For '3' mobile).

The adverts were becoming so intrusive as to make web browsing on the phone almost impossible. I don't think it's exactly Ovivo's fault, I'm often in quite a poor reception area for Vodofone and each time the phone loses the signal and re-connects it seemed that Ovivo server up another Ad page. I could spend 15 minutes just trying to get the "continue" button to light up! I was never able to bypass it by hitting 'back' or opening another browser tab, I always got the same 3/4's loaded Ad page.

My partner has an Ovivo sim in a "dumb phone". She basically gets a free mobile service. Although she says that occasionally text messages mysteriously fail to get sent, they just stay in the out-box for ever. Maybe even that part of the service is starting to fall apart.

OverRated

Still an Ovivo fan 18 months later. My £15 sim card - still has in excess of £15 remaining - had two extra credits for recommending plus £3 for porting in my number. The only time I actually ever spend is texting from USA.

I do get issues trying to surf the internet - my wife only really uses her data usage for the Facebook app and never has any trouble.

Had the odd frustrating moment when it would play up when using the internet but never voice/text.

Kernel_Sanders

'If you bought an OVIVO
SIM in the Great Gift
Giveaway round one- we’ll
be in touch on Monday 20th
January with the details of
your voucher – so keep an
eye on your email inbox!'

This deal is on again now (presumably called round 2). Has anyone got these vouchers yet and are they just for e.g. £5 off a £100 spend?

OverRated wrote: »

Still an Ovivo fan 18 months later. My £15 sim card - still has in excess of £15 remaining -

Its odd you've had a £15 sim for that length of time.

Roger1

Kernel_Sanders wrote: »

Has anyone got these vouchers yet and are they just for e.g. £5 off a £100 spend?

I bought a data SIM and 'won' £1.

I claimed, since when no info on how to redeem.