The first half of this week was tough. Things broke. As they are purported to, they broke in threes.

last.fm

As many denizens of the Internet might know, last.fm broke early in the week.

Once upon a time, this would be something I might not have even noticed, but since last year’s Android Music Adventure experiment, I have become quite the last.fm enthusiast. I now use the service to track all the music I listen to, to discover new music (which is mostly music that has somehow gone missing from my library in the move from tape to CD to MP3), to listen to music at work, and to keep track of statistics on what I listen to.

Yes, I like statistics.

At the end of the day, I can listen to music using my phone or the library on my home computer (which is what I mostly do anyways). But it broke. Which sucked.

giffgaff

Of course, having last.fm broken doesn’t necessarily matter if you can’t connect to it. And when I was mobile, I couldn’t connect to it.

Why? Giffgaff went down.

That isn’t exactly fair, of course — giffgaff is a “virtual” mobile network, meaning it runs on another company’s hardware. And that company, O2, had a major network crash, which lasted for approximately 25 hours.

The phone

Of course, having your mobile network broken doesn’t mean much if your phone is not working. And mine has developed a fault.

The down volume button doesn’t work.

If this sounds like a small problem, it’s because it should be. But for some reason, this triggers my phone to go into Safe Mode in Android Ice Cream Sandwich. There seems to be no way around it. I’ve tried a stock ROM, and all sorts of other ROMs. None of them work.

What does work is going back to Gingerbread. But after half a year of using Ice Cream Sandwich, it feels like being back in the stone age — I have grown accustomed to many of the Ice Cream Sandwich features.

The plan today is to stick with Gingerbread until Jelly Bean is available for my phone — hopefully later this month. Then hope that Jelly Bean will play nice with slightly broken hardware.

If it doesn’t, then I will have a dilemma: I want my next phone to be compatible with a 4G network in the UK, but those don’t exist yet. Do I limp along with Gingerbread until then? Or upgrade my phone early?

And if I upgrade, to what?

My first thought was the Motorola Atrix HD. I’ve like Motorola phones in the past.

But for some reason, Motorola — who are owned by Google — lock down their Android phones and don’t ship with the latest version of the Operating System. On the other hand, Google branded phones by Samsung (who I no longer trust to build robust hardware) are easy to root.

Colour me confused.

In any case, I apologize for missing your call this week.

A month ago, the last straw was reached with my current mobile provider, O2. I had long been paying a premium for O2. They genuinely have the best customer service team I have experienced in the UK, and the cost felt worthwhile.

Still, I had started to feel a little troubled about it. They were, quite literally, 30% more expensive than their closest rival (from what I could tell), with less network coverage. The internet went from “unlimited” to a 500 MB cap, which started to become a problem. But still, I kept on as a paying customer … until they started censoring the Internet.

So I began to search for a new mobile provider. And a month later, we’re moving to a whole new age.

Let me walk you through it.

My profile

When we look at plans, it all hinges on how I use my mobile service, naturally enough. Plans that work for me do so because they give me enough for my purposes, plus a little buffer. Were I to get 1,000 minutes a month, 900 of them would often go wasted. Not all these plans are necessarily good for you.

I tend to use …

• About 100 minutes a month of talk time. If I’m making a lot of calls, this can get up over 200 minutes. I have only once made 300 minutes of calls in a month. (In related news, my 16-year-old self wonders how I function in my 30s.
• About 10 text messages a month. Seriously. Why send a text message when you can send an email?
• An unknown amount of mobile internet. These days O2 sends me a monthly warning telling me that I’m approaching my limit, and I purposely avoid using my phone’s more bandwidth-heavy functions when I’m away from a WiFi connection. 1 GB a month would probably allow me to relax, but I like to think of myself as “cutting edge” in this area (even if it’s not true), so unlimited internet is definitely preferable.

In addition to my basic needs, there are a couple of principles.

• I will not look at Orange, who chased me away to O2 in 2008 by practically daring me to leave the service. While O2 could someday stop censoring the Internet, and win me back, Orange will never have me as a customer again after treating me like crap.
• I will not sign a contract that is longer than one month in length. Long contracts are for suckers — they take away the phone company’s motivation to take care of you every day. Instead, they need to look after you only when your contract expires. I refuse to be locked in again.

A final piece of criteria is the attitude towards customers. Part of this is customer service — what O2 excels at. The second part is an approach to doing business which puts the customer at the centre of the puzzle. It is with this second piece that O2 has failed. The cap on internet usage and the censorship of certain sites shows me the path they have chosen for their customers is to limit us in ways that are convenient to O2. I would, if possible, like a company that tries to enable me to use their network as I please. One that wants me online with their service, rather than paying a bill but attempting to avoid using my phone where possible.

The candidates

A search was performed, and candidates emerged.

T-Mobile

The Plan: 350 minutes; 300 texts; 500 MB. £15.32
Good: It’s cheaper than O2.
Bad: Bad service. Too little internet. Coverage maps have gaps near my home.

The first place we looked was T-Mobile. Their plan is basically the same as what I have from O2, more-or-less, for about £5 cheaper. Online reviews suggest that their customer service is terrible, even after taking into account that most people write about customer service online in order to complain about slights, real or perceived.

On top of that, their service map shows huge service gaps in my neighbourhood, which would be a pain in the ass.

Virgin

The Plan: 350 minutes; unlimited texts; 1 GB internet. £15.32
Good: Customer service.
Bad: On the T-Mobile network.

I’m still not sure how this works. Virgin uses T-Mobile’s network. Gives twice as much internet, the same number of minutes, and better customer service. All for the exact same price. Anybody who buys the T-Mobile plan must be nuts.

Still, being on the T-Mobile network means large network gaps near my home, so while they appear to be an attractive option, not for folks in my part of town.

Three

Plan 1: 2000 minutes; 5000 texts; unlimited internet. £25.
Plan 2: 300 minutes; 3000 text; 1 GB. £15.
Good: Potential for unlimited internet.
Bad: Cost of unlimited internet; network coverage.

There were two plans from Three that were both intriguing. Of the major carriers, Three was the only one that provided an unlimited internet plan on a one month contract. At £25, however, it was also the only plan that would have me paying more than I pay right now. The other Three option that was interesting was one that looked just like Virgin, but with out the hole in the network around my house.

Three has two problems. The first is a negative perception of its customer service. It had very mixed reviews on this. Normally I would consider mixed reviews to mean good, but this time one of the bad ones came from somebody I trust.

Possibly an unusual bad experience, yes, but troublesome all the same.

The second was an across-the-board problem reported from all directions. Three seems to overstate the extent of their network coverage. While they purport to cover as much as anybody else, online reviews simply suggest otherwise.

Giffgaff

Plan: 250 minutes; unlimited texts; unlimited internet. £10.
Good: Uses O2 network; customer centred; inexpensive; good customer service
Bad: Uses O2 network; pay-as-you-go

I actually looked at several smaller outfits, but Giffgaff impressed. They run on the O2 network, which is a bit of a pain given the reason for the change, and the fact that O2 can still censor my Internet. But Giffgaff is not run with that same philosophy, so it makes the problem easier to bear. (Also, it is less than half the price.)

On the other hand, my area of town seems to have coverage issues with several providers, but my mobile signal with O2 has never been a problem. O2 also has the fastest 3G connections in the country, which is not a bad thing.

The only thing that’s strange about Giffgaff is that it is an exclusively pay-as-you-go network. You can “top up” with a contract-like deal, however — the £10 one above being a good fit for me. Between that and auto top-ups, it isn’t as bad as my previous experience with pay-as-you-go would lead me to believe.

So what am I doing?

It should be obvious from reading the above, I think.

I’ve gone Giffgaff.

If you’d care to follow me to Giffgaff, you can do so by ordering a free SIM here. Full disclosure, if you order a SIM through that link (and activate it), I get £5 free credit. But so do you, so everybody wins.

And how did O2 take my departure?

Like champs, I must say. Another awesome customer service representative took my cancellation call, and was classy and polite about the whole thing. She was so nice, I couldn’t even bear to rant about the whole internet censorship thing.

Which is almost too bad, really.

On Friday afternoon, I clicked on a link on my mobile phone. Rather than being forwarded to the expected website I was instead surprised to find the site had been blocked. There was a warning, purportedly from my mobile services provider.

This website contains potentially offensive material, said the warning. You may only pass if you give us credit card details. To confirm your age, you know.

(I’m paraphrasing; the actual message had been parsed through multiple boards of lawyers and marketeers.)

My initial reaction was that my connection had been hijacked, and I had been redirected to a credit-card-number harvesting operation. I mean, if I ran a credit card harvesting operation, that’s exactly the sort of thing that I would write on my website. Besides which, I have viewed material that was in a similar category of “objectionable” on my phone before. And my phone company knows my birth date, hence my age. Why would they need my credit card number to confirm it?

Totally a scam.

But when I attempted to confirm that it was actually a scam, I was shocked that O2′s own support page describes exactly what happened:

To protect children and young people, some types of content are classified by the mobile industry as suitable only for people aged 18 or over. You will need to verify your age in order to gain access to such content.

If ‘Parental Control’ is activated on your mobile and you don’t want it anymore, you’ll need your PIN to remove it. If you don’t have the PIN that you set-up on activation, you’ll need to verify that you’re over 18. You can do this either via WAP/WEB, by visiting an O2 store or by contacting Customer Service using the ‘Email us’ or ‘Call us’ link below.

This is necessary to ensure that children and young people are only allowed to access WAP/WEB content, which is suitable for all ages.

To verify your age at an O2 store, you’ll require official documentation such as a passport or a photocard driving licence. To verify your age remotely, you’ll be asked to enter the following details:

Initials

Postcode

Credit card details

Email address

We need to confirm that your card is valid and that you are who you say you are and, for this reason, £1 will be debited in order to process this. This can be paid for with a credit card that is registered to yourself. Once this transaction is complete we will reimburse you with £2.50 on your Pay Monthly account or to your Pay & Go credit.

I also confirmed that they do, in fact, know my date of birth. Assuming they can do basic maths, or own a computer, they can presumably make the determination that I am over 18.

While the possibility of a quick and easy £1.50 are obviously tantalizing to the average adult during these days of austerity, I am nevertheless aggrieved.

First, that somebody else is deciding what I can and cannot view through my own internet connection. Once my ISP starts saying “sorry, we do not want you visiting that website”, where does that end? Will negative reviews of the company be off limits? Can Bob’s Boot Boutique pay O2 money to place Buck’s Boot Bonanza on the block list?

And who is this person deciding that the page I was visiting contained material flagged as inappropriate? Is there something particularly grievous about visiting a comic about an owl? Is Dilbert blocked too?

Even should I be visiting pages about breasts and the women who expose them — such pages are also blocked, it’s not all about owls — the person making these calls does not share my values. Otherwise the restrictions would be limited pretty much to child pornography and photos of Yaks. Which, I suppose, would also include Yak Porn. Which is not blocked.

Second, having decided that only customers above a certain age are permitted to view these pages, O2 then completely ignores the birth date that they have had on file for the last three years, and instead ask me for credit card details. At this point, rather than being a service they provide (unasked) for parents, it instead becomes an extra chore for me … and I am apparently paying them to force me to do it.

Finally, the manner in which they set up this gateway makes it look like a scam. Much like banks that cold call you, then ask you for your confirming details (what’s your secret word?) before they will talk to you.

O2 possesses sufficient detail about me to debit money from my bank account and send me bills, and a good deal of other personal information about me besides. Things that I wouldn’t necessarily want to share with hackers or identity thieves. And they are training their customer base to see this sort of interaction — oh look, a webpage I didn’t intend to go to. They want my credit card details! — as something that is normal and OK.

Fuck that. Fuck them.

O2, you’re fired.

I have long hated that you took away my limitless 3G data plan, though I never really butted against the new cap. In principle, I will sooner-or-later really like some sort of bandwidth-heavy phone application, and you will have screwed me over.

But that was OK. I only have to give you a thirty-day warning that I am leaving.

Now you have piled on — censoring my connection, too? Encouraging your customers to play fast-and-loose with their credit card information online? Not realizing that you already have every pay monthly customer’s age on file?

It’s too much. I refuse to be your customer any longer.

Where to go?

With O2 out the door, the question becomes — who will I choose as my next provider?

Cost and coverage will play into the calculation, of course, and here at the Big Bad Blog, we are quite comfortable making these kinds of comparisons. But what we really want from our mobile phone company is decent customer service.

Things go wrong. We understand this. We want a phone company where you can call somebody about it; a person who will listen to your problem and has the authority to take corrective action.

Foreign readers may be unaware exactly how rare this is here in the UK. BT’s customer service will not listen to what you say, and claim that you that you need to pay a £175 fee because the phone you are calling them on is not connected to the grid. Sky’s customer service will listen and say “that sucks. We should fix it. But we can’t. I’ll get fired if I pass your complaint along to somebody who can actually fix a problem.” Orange’s customer service will listen, say “that’s awful, I’ll fix it for you,” and then not fix it.

But O2 is different — this is why I have been with O2 for so long. Each and every time I called customer service, I got an actual person. That person listened to my problem, and either fixed the problem while I waited or told me “I’ll take care of it. This will fixed by Tuesday.”*

But O2 cannot be the only ones with good customer service, and good customer service doesn’t matter if the service itself is disappointing. Your blogger has already been unimpressed by Orange, and has been told that Vodafone has similar issues with censorship. What mobile phone provider would you recommend? Why would you recommend them?

*Or some other day in the near future.

The Internet is so often a place for complaints, and the Big Bad Blog is no exception to that. Our complaints here include those against Grammy award winners, homeopaths, airlines, and (most likely) kids these days.

But it’s important not to just complain. Sometimes, the folks out there get things right and do a good job. Sometimes they do such a good job that they blow you away.

Which is what just happened to me.

Last week, my phone broke. I couldn’t lock the screen, turn it off, or listen to music on it. It had gone from an extremely useful device to a pain in the butt that I could not turn off.

So on Monday, I called the phone company and explained the situation. I had taken out an insurance policy on my phone that covered accidental damage, but was still expecting the process to be painful. I would have to explain in detail what happened, send off my old phone to be repaired, and it would take a month.

Or something like that. I was ready to fight, in order to get things sorted out in a reasonable amount of time.

Real life went like this:

Mr Topp: My phone broke.
O2 Insure: How did it break?
Mr Topp: I dropped it. Now the screen won’t turn off and the headphones don’t work. Can you fix it?
O2 Insure: We don’t fix phones. We only replace them. We would be happy to replace your phone.
Mr Topp: That’s nice of you.
O2 Insure: What kind of phone is it?
Mr Topp: A black iPhone 3G, 16GB.
O2 Insure: Oh, I’m sorry, we don’t have those in stock. Would you be OK with the 3GS?
Mr Topp: OK.
O2 Insure: Great! It will be there tomorrow.

For not the first time, the people at O2 were friendly, understood the problem, and took care of it quickly. These guys blow my expectations away every time I have a problem.

And now I have a new iPhone in my pocket — one that works.

Kudos, O2.