Tello

Jaded1 · 21 August 2016 at 11:45AM

Hi. Old newby! Very light user. Via the forum, it looks as if Tello are offering a good deal at £3:50 per month. Does any reader have experience of the Tello service? Eg, coverage, customer service if there is a problem. J

Atasas · 21 August 2016 at 12:33PM

Jaded1 wrote: »

Hi. Old newby! Very light user. Via the forum, it looks as if Tello are offering a good deal at £3:50 per month. Does any reader have experience of the Tello service? Eg, coverage, customer service if there is a problem. J

One of the best

gogol · 30 August 2016 at 10:20AM

I am currently in the process of moving my service to Tello. I'll jot down my experience so far and let forum members draw their conclusions.
On the 19th of August I created a plan for myself on tello.co.uk - £9 per month - and ordered the sim. You have to decide and pay for a plan before you can order a sim. The sim arrived on the 22nd of August. I activated the sim on the same day and also provided a PAC to enable porting in of my original number from my old provider - Giffgaff. Keeping my number is very important to me as all my associates and contacts I have built during my long career have this number. I have switched providers before (often after very useful advice from MSE forums on better tariffs) and there have never been any problems.
23rd August : Received email confirmation that porting process is underway - "Thank you for choosing Tello. The porting in of your number is underway and it may take up to 2 working days for the process to be completed. We will contact you either by phone or email as soon as your number has been ported successfully."
25th August : Checked via email on the status of the porting in.
25th August: Received reply - "Thank you for choosing Tello. The port in should be completed by today or early tomorrow. We appreciate your patience."
26th August: I sent another email asking about the status.
26th August: This time the reply was a bit strange - "Thank you for choosing Tello. Unfortunately we still have not received notification from your old provider as our port request was successfully submitted but we are still awaiting on the completion of the port for the number you requested. We will keep you updated and will notify you as soon as your old provider releases the number on to us. We appreciate your patience."
My understanding was (and I might be wrong so please correct me) that the old provider didnt have anything to do with the porting out process after providing the PAC. I never heard of old service providers refusing to release customers to new providers (be it broadband, tv, or phone). However I thought lets reach out to the good people (and they are literally good people) at Giffgaff and request them to speed up any delays on their part.
27th August: Received reply from Giffgaff - "Harry here from the giffgaff team, sorry to hear that you're leaving giffgaff, I hope there wasn't anything we could do to help an issue. There is no issue at our end regarding your port out, we don't have anything to do with numbers porting out of giffgaff only porting number into giffgaff. You'll need to contact your new provider and ask them for information on when your number is due to port in."
Voila! As expected. I was checking and my old number stopped being in operation with giffgaff on 24th as one would expect.
Now I'm a bit worried. Why did that guy from tello make up an excuse like that. When companies start to fib to you they've usually messed up. So I forward this reply to Tello and stress again how important keeping my original number is to me.
27th August: Reply from tello - "Thank you for your e-mail. We will open an investigation and check this issue further with our provider. As soon as an update is available, we will get back to you. We truly apologize for the inconvenience."
Since then I have called tello customer service daily to check on the status of my port in. Standard response has been - "We have opened an investigation. We are waiting updates from our provider 3. We will get a response today or tomorrow. As soon as we do we shall call you to update."
Goes without saying no contact from them whatsoever.

This is the extent of my experience with tello. As and when I have updates I will keep this forum updated.

Updated: 31st August
My number has been ported in to tello. I got a call from customer service confirming once this was done. Big sigh of relief for me. All is well that ends well I suppose.

Jaded1 · 30 August 2016 at 9:08PM

Thanks Gogol, glad I didn't make progress in this direction.

KingS6 · 31 August 2016 at 4:13AM

I too have ordered a Tello sim, so will be watching these updates with great interest.

Obviously_the_best · 31 August 2016 at 9:36PM

gogol the same happened to me moving from GiffGaff to iD. Seems GiffGaff have a habit of blaming the new provider when the new provider haven't received the information required from GiffGaff.

The only thing that would put me off of Tello is that they don't provide international roaming, i.e. you can't use your phone outside the UK

moniMo · 31 August 2016 at 10:20PM

Yeah, they don't have roaming but they have an app that you can use with WiFi while being abroad.. which is pretty cool, you avoid roaming charges with that and it works really well.

It saves a lot of money if you ask me..

gogol · 1 September 2016 at 9:03AM

Only one major downside to the international roaming arrangement is that you wont receive incoming calls or text. So you become uncontactable via phone and sms while abroad. I will cautiously say though that the savings being on their national plan are a lot. I am still only a few days in so will give more feedback on connectivity etc after few months of use. If you're someone who doesnt roam a lot or not too fussed with staying in contact while roaming it seems like a good deal.

Catherine_Tello · 1 September 2016 at 2:24PM

Dear Gogol,

Thank you very much for your patience and understanding. We apologize once again for taking longer than expected. This usually never happens, it was one of the very few exceptions when processes don’t work normally, but we hope that you’ll be satisfied with our services because we really do our best to keep our customers happy!
Thank you, once again, for not losing patience and for staying with us!

Catherine, from Tello