Unlimited Mobile Internet: We need your feedback

[#1]

@khairul - Sorry, read it three times over and didn't realise.

[#2]

Another lie from giffgaff apart from the UNLIMITED issue but now they can not close a topic on time what a joke

if I had known that this was all hype I would not have come here in the first place but everywhere I goggled giffgaff all I read was good things perhaps I should have realised there is no such thing as UNLIMITED anywhere in the world just a play on words as long as you don't use it.

I wont be buying another goodybag or putting any credit on the sim until I am told if we have UNLIMITED or not will the texts be next please don't use to many as we can not afford that as well loll

anyway giffgaff you know my e-mail address if you can work out your own T&C let me know but now all the people I have told about giffgaff have been retold that UNLIMITED DOSE NOT MEAN UNLIMITED and to use only if they want to but NOT on my recommendations

in the future I will not be giving giffgaff a glowing reference but telling people the truth about my experiences of gifgaff unless I am told otherwise a different story from giffgaff themselves which I wont hold my breath on

[#3]

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@craig_t wrote:

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@turkeyphant wrote:
Craig - I think some things are clear.

1. If you introduce limits hidden or otherwise you MUST be upfront about them. And "unlimited" doesn't cut it any more.
2. If you cut people off you MUST give them fair warning. Even a text will do. But given your tethering detection is demonstrably fallible, this is the bare minimum.
3. Throttling is much preferable to cutting off. This would seem to solve all your issues while annoying the least people. Why has this not been an option from the start?!

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Hi turkey,

1) Should limits come into the equation, then we will of course discuss them.

2) In some situations, we simply have to act to prevent people affecting the service for other users. The point you've raised on communications / warnings is something others have mentioned, so that has been taken on board for discussion.

3) Throttling is something, as you say, that people have mentioned, and that indeed a lot of people feel could be something they can work with. So, we are absolutely looking into it right now.

Summed up, it's not available right now for us, and will take some time, money and tech support to implement. That makes it a prioritisation decision for us with everything else this year. However, even with that, it could be available soon. Lots of factors come into play with it.

So - for this discussion, it's not an option currently, so we've not included it as an option from the start.

I hope this helps some with your questions, and if you have any questions on that, do just shout.

--craig

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craig do you think we are hat niave?  'In some situations, we simply have to act to prevent people affecting the service for other users' if its ONE PERCENT  as you are claiming then that would be impossible to affect other users!

and if you are claiming 'truly unlimited'  internet how are we as users ment to know when too much is too much? why do three who are truly unlimited not worried about other users getting affected? their network runs just fine and they definitely wouldnt cut of a customer without notification...especially over your laughable claim of 1%

you promised a service when phones couldnt take advantage now we are living in a smartphone world giffgaff cannot handle it,and instead of being honest about it you try to push blame to the consumer for using a service YOU promote as unlimited

ASA and the ombudsman i am sure are very busy right now dealing with giffgaff complaints

[#4]

**Update: 24th Feb**

Good afternoon,

Just as a quick update as to where we are.

Having locked this discussion early this week, we've collating together the final pieces of feedback and suggestions from the thread. With over 3,000 responses and what's looking like almost 1,000 participants, there's been a lot of stuff to write up and look at - even though we've been keeping record as quickly as we could while the thread was active.

We are currently aiming to review the results next week, and will come back with an update after this by the end of next week as to what will be happening next.

Kind regards,

Craig

[#5]

**Update: 17th April**

Good afternoon,

Firstly, I can appreciate that people are wondering where our update is. We are going for in the next couple of weeks we hope.

We're sorry for the delay in update over the last month. There have been a combination of factors behind this - what we have been doing is continuously working on this. There have not been any updates to share just yet, but we'll update even if we have no news in the coming weeks.

Having bought together the opinions of those who participated, the amount of suggestions made needed to be explored. This required consulting a bunch of different people and avenues, us scratching our heads for extra ideas and seeing how and if we could make many of your ideas work.

There have also been us checking some things on the legal side (nothing conspiracy theory inducing - this is normal process for a lot of discussions we have). The legal part tends to be the final piece of the puzzle, and the part that takes most long in anything. This is what we're waiting on currently.

I hope this gives a bit more insight into the time delay on reply here. We're hoping that we'll be in a position to run through this in the coming couple of weeks - as we're at the final stage (we hope) before we can run through this now.

--craig

[#6]

Apologies for the delay here everyone.

As I've posted on a couple of data discussion threads elsewhere on the forums in recent days, we've taken a step back from our original intended solution and our now deep in a process that involves analysing a lot of factors in much more detail. It's clear that at the moment the way people use their data is changing - especially as new mobile devices become available. Devices such as the latest larger-screen mobiles (HTC range, S3 etc) and hybrid devices (the Galaxy Note, Padfone etc) are offering you all quite a few new options for using data on the move.

We therefore decided to step back and take a longer look into what we can offer into the future. We know it's frustrating as it's taking a bit more time than we'd originally envisioned, but this is something we need to do so we can minimise the risks of needing to do this all again very soon.

So right now we can't give an estimate of when we'll be able to announce our solutions for data. But your thoughts and opinions are being raised in our discussions and we will get this process completed as soon as we possibly can.

Thanks for you patience everyone!

[#7]

Hi all,

A further update for you all today. I've just had a quick chat, and it appears we're making progress towards our preferred solution for data use on Goodybags. At this point in time, we continue to see a similar pattern to the start of the year where just 1% of people are using upwards of 40% of the total data used each month. This is a similar pattern to that seen by other companies, and both 3 and T-Mobile have been either using or trialling measures to reduce the amount of data used by their heavy data using customers.

LIke other companies, we will need to implement some form of traffic management policy. What we are currently aiming for is to have a policy that will still allow you to enjoy an unlimited data plan - however, this is not certain yet as discussion is still ongoing. Any policy we propose to implement will be open and transparent, so there should no longer be any concerns over what is and isn't allowed. Alongside this we are working on improving our ability to detect and manage tethering (which is not allowed on Goodybags), detect and manage peer-to-peer and file sharing activity, and also increase data efficiency of video streaming. In all of this we are looking to make sure that the impact on you as a user is kept to a minimum.

Thanks again for your patience as we work through this reassessment phase and prepare our plan for the future.

[#8]

Hi everyone,

It has been a little while since we last updated you on the Unlimited Data situation - sorry about this but as I am sure you can all imagine there is a lot to review, test and discuss before putting anything forward. So in an effort to be open and transparent with you all, I wanted to give you an update on where we are at right now.

As most of you are aware, the ASA received a small number of complaints from some of our customers about how we are barring users from the service for breach of our terms and conditions. We have been working with the ASA over the past few weeks to ensure what we are doing is fair to all and we expect a final answer from them in the next few days.

With regards to the unlimited data we offer, this is something we absolutely want to ensure we continue to provide and on top of that, continue being great value for money. However, as the average amount of data people consume increases at a steady rate and the cost to giffgaff isn't decreasing, this means a lot of wider discussions had to take place on our offerings.

The last thing we want to do is remove unlimited, increase prices or impose restrictions on usage. However, with everything that has happened, we have to do something. So, we have been reviewing the following:

Tethering - while it is already against our terms of service, we are looking at systems that can improve our effectiveness at automatically detecting and blocking tethering use for Unlimited Internet plans.

Traffic policies - We will continue to explore methods which will ensure the majority of our users have a good level of service during times when the network is very busy.

Product testing - we are currently in the process of testing different portfolio alternatives for giffgaff. Our main objective is to understand how potential prospects & current members would respond to a wider variety of alternative data products.

So as you can see, there are a few things being reviewed. With the growing rate of data usage per member, it's clear we have to implement something. But we want to stress that no matter what we roll out, we want to continue providing a great service to those who are using data legitimately.

These are all still in plan/review stage though and we hope to have a more concrete plan by next month which we will update you on. Ideally we will be looking to roll out whatever plan we decide on by the end of October.

Thanks,

Gregg