EE: Of course we're going to get 1m 4G users by the end of the year!

Good luck with that!

I can't see them making it happen. One of the biggest problems Orange/EE/T-Mobile/Hutchinson Telecom have are users like my wife and me. We both took 24 month contracts with Orange. Within 3/4 months of both of us starting a new contract, they upped the price, which they are allowed to do. (Sure it isn't a contract then? If one party can change it to suit them.) At that point I felt cheated and Orange lost out any chance of getting my BB/LL business (I was about to sign up when the price rise hit, if I hadn't been slack, I would be stuck in another awful Orange contract.)

Since then Orange has repeatedly tried to get me into another contract, they've offered me phones earlier, upgrades to EE/4G, BB, LL and every other service they can think of. To me it is obvious they are struggling, as over the last 6 months they have phoned me at least once a month trying to get me to sign up to one thing or another.

Then to add insult to injury, they have now rewarded themselves another contract pay rise. Noting I haven't had a pay rise in 3 years. Now my contract is due to finish in 3 weeks, notice already given, code awaiting for my new provider. 2 price rises in under 20 months, this isn't fair and a damn good way to pee off customers.

Orange you have screwed up here, your money grabbing has cost you both of our contracts and our BB/LL business, which you nearly had (so glad I didn't). I have learnt a valuable lesson, a contract isn't a contract to Orange and to NEVER, EVER go on a long term contract again. I refuse to be shafted like this again. From now on I will buy my own phone and go on a rolling 30 day contract.

UP YOURS HUTCHINSON TELECOM.

I am not surpirsed

Lately, I find the company to be too arrogant and rigid in its approach.

The price gouging is the final nail in the coffin, for me at least.

318,000 punters

Amazing they found so many (...) willing to burn their cash. But hey, I'm sure they were not disappointed!

T-EE

I was lured into leaving them. Poor coverage, poor service, prices rising.

T Mobile certainly upset me with their new brand. The 3G service became shit. Fortunately this coincided with my contract ending and as they only seemed interested in 4G it was ""Bye Bye T-Mob" or EE or whatever.

Hope this will drive down the price of 3G contract, just no need for 4G at the moment.

ouch

Its far too expensive. Only a fool would pay those sorts of prices.

I signed up to my latest contract in March on their "Orange" brand rather than "EE" because I didn't want to spend an extra £10/month to get the same tariff on 4G instead of 3G. The phone I choose (Note 2) is available with 4G so that wasn't a deciding factor.

If they want to get the sales figures up to 1 Million by the end of the year as EE they should match the prices of their other brands.

My experience

So far I've pretty much had bad experience with mobile companies. I used to be on bt with PAYG which was all well and good, but the charges started getting absurd, even with free minutes etc, I was going through £10 of credit per day, and with no record of what was stripping me of my credit I coulnd't really contest anything, so I scrapped PAYG and moved to contract. BT lost my business because they upped all their prices without informing anyone (why I left them)

Moved to a contract with Three since they had teh best coverage in my local area. All was well and good, great contract, cheap, good phone upgrades. Until it came to cancelling.

I signed up for a new contract with 3, and asked they cancel the old one (due to a deal it was easier to sign the new and cancel the old, and cheaper to boot) a month later I got a new bill through, called up and asked why they hadn't cancelled it, instead of doing what they asked, they'd extended me onto another 24 month contract. They refused to cancel this so I cancelled the DD, they then called in debt collectors on me. After several months of talking to ofcom and god knows how much in phonebills from calling india eventually the contract was cancelled since I hadn't signed anything.

I think the end result was from talking to their governing body, with my end result being. "I didn't sign a contract, I did not want a new contract, I have not used this new contract Three signed me up for. If this contract is not cancelled, I will be taking you to court, and I will be making sure as many news papers know about it as possible" It was at that point they cracked, partly because of the newspaper threat (i like to think) mostly because they didn't have a single piece of evidence to say I'd signed up to the contract since nothing was signed, and they'd basically broken procedure.

So out of three, onto orange. And yet more problems. First of all random drops in signal, random charges which made no sense to me, turned out orange had pre-installed bloatware on my phone which charges £4 a month, with no way to uninstall it. I had to contact orange and tell them to deactivate the subscription and refund me what I'd been charged... Every month... Eventually i had to install Cyanogenmod purely to get rid of teh orange bloatware.

Move on to the home internet. We've been with wanadoo > freeserve > orange for years. Wanadoo were great, Freeserve were okay, Orange are lying scum who have cost us a lot of money. For starters the quality of service drop with each changeover, ignorable as it may be. We would get random letters from Orange stating we'd exceeded their "fair use" policy, despite nobody downloading anything, and after contact them refusing to tell us what counted as "fair use" eventually the letters stopped.

Moving on to the home phoneline. We were stuck on 2mb for ages due to the area we were in, I noted that many houses in our area were on 16. Funny enough later that week Orange called us, telling us that we could get 16mb in our area, and that we could lower our monthly bill by changing from a BT landline to an Orange landline. Family consulted me since I'm the IT guy, told them to confirm that they could get the speeds in writing, and the bills in writing and if they did, go for it. So they did and they went for it.

The itnernet speed went up to 8mb, and atop the bill they sent us, they were adding an extra £15 per month. Why? We're outside of the core orange area, so it costs an extra £15 per month for orange services, despite the fact they called us, and they never informed us of these hidden charges despite the family asking, several times. Why was our internet speed half of what they promised? Because we're outside of the core area, they can only offer ADSL up to 8mb.

After much arguing my family settled on the first 6 months free, followed by paying the full bill for the next 6 months. This was ignoring my advice to get the contract cancelled outright for orange failing to uphold their end of the deal, and failing to provide information when asked. We're moving back to BT in August, the family doesn't seem to realize that changing the line back to BT will probably cost an arm and a leg.

I dont' deny my family isn't at fault for the last section of this, they're idiots who ignored my advice. But the rest of it (well the orange bit, who are now EE) is just a small subsection of my experience in what shysters they are. I would not trust them in any way shape or form when it comes to broadband. And I have little faith in any mobile company when it comes to mobile contracts (I'm probably moving to giffgaff when my contract expires)

And it's not just me, a friend of mine had Orange cancel 5 of his contracts (he had the contracts for his whole family cancelled) why? Orange blocked one of his payments due to a fault on their system. He then paid again and informed them, a week later they charged him for that month a second time, when he called to compalin they apologized... and charged him a third time. They then sent out a later demanding payment because he hadn't paid anything that month and locked all his contracts. By this point he had failed to pay his rent and gas bill.

When he called up he pretty much ripped them a new one, demanded the contracts be cancelled since their collosal fuckup had cost him so much. Luckily he works in sales so he actually knew how to word it correctly "rather than my usual you fucked up you sort this... I'm not good with people)

And even with workplace contracts they're shit. Where I work there's a lot of travel to china / portugal / eastern europe. So what happens? The company signs up for a mobile deal with orange, with raoming set up abroad for all company mobiles. Small extra cost sure but it saves money in the long run. Except with orange who cancelled the free roaming since it hadn't been used during the firs tfew months, but continued to charge for it, and then proceeded to charge a few thousand more to the company for roaming charges when the roaming was used.

I'm honestly not surprised EE have lsot customers and revenue. If they stopped bullshitting everyone and started to deliver on what they promised they might actually retain customers.

Another point....

As said above, there isn't much need or demand for 4G at the moment. They are having to push it now, because when other providers start to offer 4G for cheaper, EE will have to drop the price to compete. So to extort, sorry maximise the monies on offer, they need to get people signed into a 24month contract at the world worst rate. Which will then increase in cost year on year (as is allowed by the so-called contract), until 4G is 2 years old, at which point, anyone with a brain cell will jump ship after realising how crap they are and how much they have been ripped off.

To me, they are missing a massive market, that they don't appear to have considered. There are many, many people around the country who can't get more than 2Mbps broadband at home, if that! Now these, to me, are the people who could really use 4G as the cost to lay cables is epic. Stick up a mast and it benefits more people, they'd sell more contracts and people in the sticks would rejoice, although probably not if they are EE customers.

. But it does mean some nasty surprises in store for the unwary.

Erratic, no, not really

Rather than recieve a nasty suprise on the bill you get sent to a redirection page asking if you'd like more data.

Seems the fairest way to do it to me.

EE keep texting me saying I could move to 4G

But I don't like in an area covered by 4G, and its not likely to be covered for a long while, as its very rural.

So, they're not even advertising it sensibly either!

Limited vs. unlimited

With data limits like 500MB on 4G, vs. unlimited at the same price point on 3G, which one would you rather choose?

It's somewhat ironic that they advertise it as being able to upload faster, stream more, download more yet it's faster to hit your data cap.

Oh, I must of missed the press announcement where they expressed deep regret for charging stupid prices and introduced a new range of competitive prices..... no? In which case we must have a lot of lottery winners in this country then....

I find it interesting that pretty much every tech blog I have seen in the last few months that runs an article about EE attracts lots of comments and generally a good 80% of them are along the lines of "I like Three" and "I'm staying with Three" (comments which I completely agree with)