Giffgaff, Tesco Mobile or Three

Amp34

Amp34

Amp34

Caporegime
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I'm going to move on to a sim only contract shortly and having a look at the options. Any plusses/minuses for GG, Tesco or 3?

All have 4G as standard
3 has 0800 no's and usage abroad free

Thinking of either the 4GB or all you can eat data 12 month contracts on Three, the £12 or £15 Giffgaff goodybag with unlimited data or the £15 Tesco contract with 2GB of data.

Is throttling going to be worse on one or the other? Bearing in mind I'm currently using up to 1GB of data a month with Orange but it's horrendously slow at the moment so I'm thinking of avoiding the EE conglomerate. I currently get Deezer for free so a sim only plan with music subscription could be of interest.
 
I recently left GG for Three ... Couple of reasons:

1) The 3G/H+/4G coverage on O2 is diabolical where I live, full coverage on Three
2) Fed up of the outage on GG (3 episodes in as many months)
3) 4G on GG is still in trial mode and the data limit is pathetic
4) Still no "at home" services on GG via O2 (such as Home Signal, Three in Touch, etc etc)
5) Free data roaming - defo winner when out Skiing abroad!
6) 4G tethering to any device(s)
7) 1 month rolling contract
8) Only cost me £4 more than I was on GG
 
I'm with 3 on a sim only contract at the moment and don't have any complaints. I'm on 3G and get around 15mb/s download. I pay 15 a month and get 600 minutes, unlimited data and unlimited texts.
 
No network is perfect.

Technically, EE is the best coverage wise as they have the biggest 3G network, 4G network and 2G network.

Their 3G is nearly identical to Three's as they share masts, Three's 4G is a lot worse. Three have no 2G.

But then, indoors EE's 2G isn't great anyway so it's not a big loss.

If you want to make phone calls and send texts, Vodafone and O2 are fine but for data they just suck. That's as straight as I can put it.

For data, either EE or Three are good options but as Three don't seem to be interested in stealing your money and giving you a tiny amount of data like EE do, I'd go with Three.
 
AlecR said:
If you want to make phone calls and send texts, Vodafone and O2 are fine but for data they just suck. That's as straight as I can put it.
Click to expand...

Not been quite my experience with those 2 down in the south west - near big cities both are fine but you don't have to move far out into the countryside and while voda appears to have good coverage the actual quality of voice and data drops off steeply and isn't represented by the signal quality at all. O2 while not having as good coverage if you can get it is usually better for call quality and fairly consistent data wise.

In the same spot, equal distance from an O2 3G mast and a voda 3G mast - it takes 3-5 attempts to even get a speedtest running on voda and its about 500-600kbit type speeds with 200-300ms latency, O2 is like 12-14Mbit with 80ms latency but swapping over to GiffGaff ~3.6Mbit down (its hard capping at 3.6 so somewhere the speed is being throttled I think) and 130ms latency (which is a huge improvement on the dialup speeds I've been getting on GG of late) and this is fairly representative of the performance I get anywhere around here.
 
Terrier_Jimlad said:
5) Free data roaming - defo winner when out Skiing abroad!
Click to expand...

Free data roaming in Ireland, France, Austria, Italy, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden only. As a trade of, roaming in any other country than the above is stupidly expensive and the only internet data addon package costs whooping £5 a day! Luckily enough, all roaming charges in the EU will be illegal from 15 december 2015, ensuring that all customers always pay the same for all calls, SMSes and mobile data usage everywhere in the EU.

But I agree, out of the selection in OP post, three is the best and has no match.
 
AlecR said:
No network is perfect.

Technically, EE is the best coverage wise as they have the biggest 3G network, 4G network and 2G network.

Their 3G is nearly identical to Three's as they share masts, Three's 4G is a lot worse. Three have no 2G.

But then, indoors EE's 2G isn't great anyway so it's not a big loss.

If you want to make phone calls and send texts, Vodafone and O2 are fine but for data they just suck. That's as straight as I can put it.

For data, either EE or Three are good options but as Three don't seem to be interested in stealing your money and giving you a tiny amount of data like EE do, I'd go with Three.
Click to expand...

I'm having a nightmare with EE/Orange signal in Central London so I'm not too keen on them at the moment. I know there is this suggestion that 3G is suffering as they are moving bandwidth to 4G but that's a big if... The extra cost (although yesterday I couldn't actually check as their website was down because of the iPhone launch...) would also put me off. I doubt I'll get a good offer when I phone up to cancel next month anyway.

v0n said:
Free data roaming in Ireland, France, Austria, Italy, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden only. As a trade of, roaming in any other country than the above is stupidly expensive and the only internet data addon package costs whooping £5 a day! Luckily enough, all roaming charges in the EU will be illegal from 15 december 2015, ensuring that all customers always pay the same for all calls, SMSes and mobile data usage everywhere in the EU.

But I agree, out of the selection in OP post, three is the best and has no match.
Click to expand...

What other networks/tariffs would you suggest?

Are there any sim only deals that come with Deezer/Netflix etc. built in?
 
I've had really bad signal for 3G coverage in the Cheshire area and used giffgaff for a while now and seem to get a good signal in most places. it's down to your area really.
 
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