Afternoon,
Over the last few months, we've been looking a lot into the usage patterns of mobile internet traffic on our network. This has been in areas like use levels over time and more general patterns of use. Rest assured, we're not looking into whether you've been browsing the latest football news or gossip columns when you should be working. We'll leave that up to your personal conscience 🙂
On a more serious note, this has thrown up some interesting and important information for everyone. So, we wanted to update you on what we've found as to how people use mobile internet services with giffgaff, and some actions we're taking because of this.
We've actually found that there is a small minority of people impacting both the community and the business in a big fashion with regards as to how they are using their data on Goodybags that have unlimited mobile internet.
Here's the rub - the way in which less than 1% of our base use data is accounting for
over 1/3 of our total mobile internet data use across the entire network.
That's quite a mind boggling statistic. As you can probably imagine, the actions of the few using data in this fashion have a couple of major consequences if we allow it to continue.
The first is an impact in terms of resource to giffgaff. The way in which these users are using their data is simply not economically sustainable for us - both in the cost of the data they are using, and in the business time spent on investigating and working with these cases. This is all time and money we could be spending elsewhere to improve and develop giffgaff as a service and community for you.
The second is an impact in terms of service to all our customers (the more than 99% of you out there) who enjoy your unlimited mobile internet and use it in a normal fashion. The way in which these users are using the service is definitely in a fashion that will impact other members in terms of service - something we don't want to happen, meaning it's noted in our Terms and Conditions.
As we don't want either customers or our long term business health to be affected, we're put into place a new set of checks on people's patterns of data usage. Without going into levels of detail that would help potential abusers, this will involve checking more frequently for patterns of use of our mobile internet services that are likely to affect other service users and the business, and for behaviour that is not genuine mobile internet use.
While we implement this, you may see a few more cases of people coming forward discussing data bars (potential or actual) on their accounts in the Help Forum or in the community. The best thing to do is to advise these people to check if any loss of data they may have is due to another factor first (eg, handset settings change, SIM problems etc) before submitting an Agent Case. Any conversations we have with people on their data use should be a private discussion, as it concerns the use of their account.
For the vast majority of customers, this will make no difference to you at all - and we hope you'll continue to enjoy what giffgaff has to offer.
Do let me know if you have any questions - as always, we'll be more than happy to discuss them.
Kind regards,
--craig
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Update: 08/01/12
This is regarding use on Goodybags with unlimited mobile internet*
Update: 11/01/12
In light of this discussion so far, what we are taking out of this is that we can discuss a few things in more detail. So, we'll be taking your points away from this thread for the next week or so to discuss how we can do this at the 'gaff.
It's worth re-emphasising at this point that we want to do all this in a fashion that protects what the majority of more than 99% the giffgaff base use already without any issues. What we've always advocated is people being responsible for their own behaviour and use, rather than write a huge list of terms and conditions, or introduce any fair use policy.
So - we'll be looking at starting a deeper discussion on unlimited mobile internet use on a Goodybag, and our communications processes around users who are judged to be breaking the terms and conditions on their service use.
Update: 02/02/2012
The new second part of the discussion is now available here.
This discussion will be locked as we'll be continuing discussion in the new thread above, as it contains additional information.
Kind regards,
Craig
