Giff Gaff opinions

trets77

I am nearly at the end of my 24 month O2 contract. I have the I-Phone 3G-s which i am quite happy with and see nothing in the new phone market worthy of paying for a new tied in contract.

Looking at the £10 Giff Gaff deal. I don't think i have come close to using more the 300 minutes in a month so for £10 it sound ideal.

Any opinions on Giff Gaff?

grumbler

giffgaff mobile network - 545 posts.
Stay Well Clear of GiffGaff
GiffGaff -- too good to be true?
GiffGaff Load of Rubbish

adamc260

Giffgaff runs on the o2 network so signal should be fine for most people

The only thing it lacks is customer service... you have to submit things through forums etc if things go wrong and other giff gaff users have to try respond/sort it out. As a trade off, you probably get more for your money than you would on other networks.

anonymousie

Changed the whole family over in the last month. Saved a shed load.

Down sides- had a 24hr outage of service during that time (annoying but it happens at times with all providers) and a slight delay in transferring my number (between Xmas and new years was apparently a bag time to choose).

It's easy to manage and monitor. THe packages are great. What more could you want.

Agree there is little formal "customer service" but TBH I've ever had good service from any of the big networks.... they'll tell you want you want to hea.... eg I had to up size my O2 data bundle for a bit then I wanted to take the bolt on of "yes we've done that" .... left me up sh*t creek as they took all the data off my account- including my included allowance !!!
(O2 also told me they'd removed my family bolt on as I asked, but when it renewed the next month I had to get them look at it - turns out the customer has to do that- well why give me crap advice to start with??)

Giffgaff forum help is great, and of anyone tells you something that isn't actually true , they are corrected within seconds!

Ultimately, if it all goes "horribly wrong" for you the worst thing that can happen is you'll lost maybe £10. Not a tragedy at all.

GooliesOfFire

Giffgaff:
- very good value for money i.e. 250minutes/unlimited texts/unlimited internet for £10/month. You cannot get better anywhere.
-free Giffgaff to Giffgaff phone calls.
-runs on the O2 network.
-no call centres. If something goes wrong, and for some it often does, it's the users within giffgaff community who mainly help solving problems first before it can get escalated to the competent person.
-their website/system is far from being perfect and sometimes people cannot even top-up for days leaving people unable to make phonecalls for days (easy fix though, top-up way ahead of the end of the month. But as always people leave it until the last minute)
-you can earn credit (£5/person) if you provide other people with sim card (family,friends) and they register and activate them (to activate you need to top up at least £5).

If your life doesn't depend on the phone then you can always give giffgaff a go. Only because of the reliability issues in some cases (not mine personally) I don't recommend it to my family (except wife and son) and friends. I want my friends to remain my friends I've read the stories about people transferring their numbers or being unable to use their phones for weeks.

Sunnyday

DH & I transfrerred to Giffgaff in January and have had no problems at all, we are saving a fortune between us and as we are now both on the same network we call each other free without using up our free minutes.

We both buy a goodybag each month, we decided that this was a safe option as we both changed over to smartphones and were a bit nervous after reading about people with large bills as the various apps synced and updated etc so peace of mind came with the unlimited internet that is included in the price. Neither of us has has any problems at all and some of our friends have now changed over too.

Its worth a try and if you don't get along with it you have lost nothing, its great knowing that there is no contract too.

HTH

SD

peachyprice

I have one child running an iphone 3g and two running Blackberries, we've had no problems other than the outage due to a flood where there server was based.

No problems topping up, no problems buying goody bags, no problems transferring numbers, no problems blocking stolen phones and ordering replacement sim card. It's saved me an absolute fortune.

Grumbler has linked to four posts about Giffgaff, you only have to look at this forum to see how many more there are complaining about Vodafone in particular, Orange and o2 on an almost daily basis.

grumbler

peachyprice wrote: »

...Grumbler has linked to four posts about Giffgaff, ...

It was not my intention to discredit them. I think regardless of the titles all threads give a balanced picture of various opinions.

teffers

Got a few family members I've switched to giffgaff and I've been with them for a year or so.

On the plus side they're cheap and usually the email only support isn't an issue.

On the negative, if a network problem occurs, including congestion (at New Year etc) or an outage, then you are firmly behind O2's own customers in the queue for a resolution.

On the whole I'm happy and would recommend them to most normal mobile users.

peachyprice

grumbler wrote: »

It was not my intention to discredit them. I think regardless of the titles all threads give a balanced picture of various opinions.

Sorry you misunderstood, I meant you'd linked to four, as in there aren't that many compared to the 100's about Vodafone for example.

neilcr_2

Been with Giffgaff for a month. Activated in 20 minutes and number ported in less than a day. Paying half what I paid on my o2 sim