I am thinking of taking up the Giff Gaff monthly contract 250 mins-250 texts and unlimited data for £10.50 a month. I presently have a smartphone on Pay as You Go so have to keep the Data turned off so i dont spend too much , i only use phone for occasional text's, phoning wife , taxi n takeaways so will never use all minutes and texts.

Has anybody any experience of Giff Gaff ?

Three have some great SIM only deals for £12/month with more minutes, texts and unlimited data.

I've been on gg for a year now. Usually run on the £10 goodybag you refer to. Suits me fine, suffered a single 8 hour outage in that time.

The fact i could just swap to another network at anytime is probably the reason i'm happy to stay on it.

Three have some great SIM only deals for £12/month with more minutes, texts and unlimited data.

Had a 3 phone on contract before n had awful problems with signal.

I'll copy and paste my post from the SeatCupra forums

GiffGaff is owned by O2, and there is no QoS in place, so you won't get pushed to the bottom of the queue when the O2 customers are on the same cell.

The only thing you may find annoying with GiffGaff, is if you're not that technically minded, and you struggle with some stuff, you can't really get in touch with GiffGaff staff. However, the forums are so active, you'll easily get an answer on there. You get money back from GiffGaff for participating in the forums, so you start a thread and you get about 20 people posting the exact same answer to get money back.

I've used them, and I've had a couple of outages. 2 of them O2's fault, and O2's customers had the same problem, and 1 of them GiffGaff's. Sometimes, their 'goodybag' system messes up, and creates a backlog. This means you can be left without credit for a day or two if you're unlucky and your goodybag renewal falls on the same day as the problems.

It's also not a recurring contract, the goodybag (which is what gives the 250 mins etc) has to be renewed by YOURSELF every month. You can buy a month in advance. So for instance, I could buy this months and next months goodybag, and when this months runs out, I can buy the month after next and so on. Recurring Goodybag's is a feature they have planned.

Also bear in mind, that if you're a blackberry user, and want to use BB Internet Services, it costs you an extra £3 a month.

iPhone users don't get visual voicemail either.

Finally, if you have a goodybag, also make sure you have some top up credit on there too. Anything that's not included in the goodybag (calls/texts from abroad, MMS messaging) will only work if you have top up credit for them to take the money from, they can't bill you for it, as they don't have a billing system. What I did the first time was bought a £10 goodybag and used the £5 free credit you get for getting a sim card for all the other stuff. After a couple of months, the £5 and been used, and when I bought my next goodybag, I also added an extra £10 credit.

I think that covers everything

P.S It's techy nerds that tend to use GiffGaff, because a lot of average Joe's don't like having to visit a website to find out information about outages etc, they like to ring people. GiffGaff don't have support telephone numbers, they only have the Agent messaging system.

Here is a link to a google document containing a comparison of buying an iPhone 4S on a contract with another network, compared to buying up front and getting a GiffGaff Sim.

https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B1u8EKNV3lb_dkFsNTdsc2tMNmM

I switched to giffgaff pretty recently (start of May) and have been really impressed so far. I forgot I topped up £10 to activate the SIM about 3 months ago as a test, and purposely didn't buy a goodybag as I was still using my old contract. So annoyingly when I "went live" with it I'd used 1p in data and therefore had to put another £10 on to get the goodybag set up, but as xreyuk said that credit will just sit there for anything I do that's not covered by the goodybag, and if necessary it can just sit there forever. It was literally as simple as give them my PAC, put the SIM card in on the correct day, and it was ported over and live. Fired up the goodybag and away, after almost a month I've still got 150 out of 250 minutes left even though it's been a busy month for phonecalls for me (been ringing recruitment people, done at least one phone interview, etc).

If you can live with keeping your old handset, which I can as I'm still happy with my original HTC Desire, then I think it's great value. Slightly less convenient than a contract due to having to remember to buy the goodybags, but you can put one in a queue ready to take over so you can do it as little as once every two months, and the freedom of not being tied into another expensive 24 month contract is worth it for me.

If you're worried about the "community" support nature of giff-gaff you could try Tesco mobile, the also run on O2 and have good deals, including allowing you to cap your bill so you can't go over your £x/month (ie if you try to use a load of data, which is great for kids).

I'm currently on an "iPhone" sim only £12.50/month for 500 mins, 3000 sms and 500mb data on a 3 month rolling contract with tesco and can't rate them highly enough. So much so the missus just moved from voda (customer for the last 5 years) to tesco on her iPhone.

That all sounds very convincing, am also trying to convince SWMBO to join as she has just got an HTC Wildfire (nowt too flash) and i have a Windows 7 phone but because of pay as you go contracts we dont really get full use of our phones but i am sure that the Giff Gaff goody Bags will more than cover our needs.

Thanks for your help folks , much appreciated.

Thought I would restart this rather than start a brand new topic.

 

I have just cancelled my T-Mobile contract and have arranged a transfer to GiffGaff.  Scanning through the 'Community' there does seem to be a bit of a slagging off going on about poor service at the moment with a 'number' of outages recently.

 

Anyone any experience?

Thought I would restart this rather than start a brand new topic.

I have just cancelled my T-Mobile contract and have arranged a transfer to GiffGaff. Scanning through the 'Community' there does seem to be a bit of a slagging off going on about poor service at the moment with a 'number' of outages recently.

Anyone any experience?

It has happened recntly, although I can't remember exactly when, Sept? Oct? Hopefully its settled down again for a few months.

I do have a current issue with intermittent data/3g but that could easily be my **** phone. It just acts like it drops the connection and you have to refresh to get it to reconnect.

Me and the wife have both switched to gg after o2 contracts finished, great value for money no issues as far as I'm concerned, there was one outage the other week, couldn't send texts for a couple of hours, oh well, used whatsapp instead, and the outage could just as easily have happened on any other network. Not sure what people are saying about having to remember / manually renew each month, our goody bags are set to auto renew each month

Giff Gaff  reported an outage last month, but neither I nor SWMBO noticed; as well as an apology, we get to chose a charity for a donation from them when they screw up in a small way, and £5 for us when they screw up in a slightly bigger way.

 

We use our phones so rarely, that we dont usually bother with the goody bags, a £5 credit top-up per month is usually enough.

Me and the wife have both switched to gg after o2 contracts finished, great value for money no issues as far as I'm concerned, there was one outage the other week, couldn't send texts for a couple of hours, oh well, used whatsapp instead, and the outage could just as easily have happened on any other network. Not sure what people are saying about having to remember / manually renew each month, our goody bags are set to auto renew each month

When this thread started 18 months ago, the auto renew feature didn't exist.

Which must mean that I've been with gg for 2 and 1/2 years. Its no longer an outstanding deal but I've yet to find anything better.

I left Vodafone after 7 years back in September as I wasn't happy with the lack of 3g when at home, when I signed up with them back in 2006 I had full signal and 3g all the time, but over the last 3 years that has gradually dropped off, and in the last year or so, i'm lucky to get any 3g at all.

 

Anyway I was paying them £41 a month (12 month contracts) for 600 mins, unlimited texts and 500mb data, my bills were never over £41 so I know I never used up all my mins or data (when at home i'm using my wi-fi anyway, so the lack of 3g wasn't a huge issue, just annoyed me paying for something that I couldn't get).

 

Anyway I switched to giffgaff, and for £10 a month I got 500 mins, unlimited text and 1gb data

 

However they have an app so you can see how many mins, texts and how much data you use in a month.

 

Turns out, I was barely using 100 mins a month as most of my calls are incoming, texts were pretty low too as most went via imessage as I have an iPhone, and the data was around 70mb's a month as always on wi-fi at home and when i'm out it's rare that I use mobile data for anything other than checking email.

 

So in the end I left giffgaff as £10 a month seemed silly as I was barely using it.

 

I am now with ovivomobile (do a google search), they use Vodafone's network and although I have the 3g issue at home again now, I don't care as it costs me £0 every month

 

1 off payment of £20 for a simcard, they give you £15 credit with that, and if you port your number to them, they give you another £3 credit (that might now be £5) and every month I get 200 mins, 300 texts and 500mb data. I never have to top up, every month my mins, texts and data gets reset, if I go over, then I just use my credit as you would with any other payg network.

 

Works for me.

When I ditched the landline I went with Lyca, with a reasonable landline/mobile rate. Then I got inundated by marketing texts, so I looked around ,to find 3 offering a PAYG deal of 3p to landlies /2 p per text and 1p per something for data. I dson't use data, so of no interest. ONLY problem is coverage .