Oh UK. You won't switch mobile providers. And now look at you! £5.8bn you've lost

Not everybody you'll be pleased to hear.

After another £70 phonebill from vodafone for near on 20min of calls out of free min, normally I pay £16, I have told them to stick it and gone to Three, where they are happy to place caps on usage and warn you if your getting near your limit. blah blah you should keep an eye on your usage blah blah (windows phone).

Second time I have left vodafone due to bullshit like this, this time it is for good. It would cost them more to bribe me back than they would earn off me as a customer.

Goodbye Three

Yesterday in the EE shop near Moorgate it took 10minutes to get my PAC code. The Three Customer person simply wouldn't take no for an answer. I literally had to bellow "For the sixth time, I don't want to answer any questions, I don't want any other deals, your network's bandwidth is terrible in London, and I'm getting out. I don't have to give you any details now please give me my PAC code." He still persisted, and then sent me to another department. Have to say the next guy took my 'non-charm offensive' and sorted it quickly.

I'll change my provider every year now (SIM only deal). They make profit on our laziness.

Switching is a bit painful

I've done it a few time with mobile ops and ISPs and only once has it been smooth and all I lost was a few hours connection time.

Often it is difficult to compare like for like charges, Halfmad has a good example - I found for ISPs/broadband I had to consider line rental which I pay yearly up front but which is not cancellable (normally) and then whether to move my phone as well and whether I could get a similar call plan, so I suspect all these things hold people back.

I've changed providers in the past. At the moment, I'm quite happy with Tesco Mobile; decent coverage, prices are OK and good service. I'm told that I could save on the monthly fee, but only by going to a provider that is a byword for poor service and appallingly bad security. Really not a difficult choice; I'll stay where I am for now, thank you.

Reasons to stick

I'm staying on my antiquated unlimited data deal as it is no longer offered (far too good a deal I assume) and lots cheaper than any current high / unlimited data offers

It has a few limitations (data usage costs apply outside of UK, so essentially UK use only on data) but closest (all more expensive deals than mine from various other phone companies) only offer between 16 - 20 Gb a month which is insufficient for me

Company sponsored 'research'

These surveys as means of getting free press coverage for a brand are getting harder to spot, aren't they?

I could save a few pence a month

by changing my One month rolling to a 12 month rolling (SIM Only).

Other providers are all in the same area as mine so the savings are not huge anyway.

However the deal breaker is that AFAIK, only "3" allows me to make calls in the USA using my UK Minutes.

And for Around £11/month I never get to my limits anyway.

If you want rip off Mobile charges go see what your existing deal costs in the USA.

Mind you many Americans can't get their head around our willingness to actually buy our handsets and go for SIM ONly.

$100+/month is not out of this world in Trumpton.

How it works in Germany

The company to which you are moving requests permission from your existing network to port the number. Normally this means they provide you with a form to do this. In this way their interests are aligned with yours when you want to switch. There are also strict timelines for the procedure with the disabling of the number on one network and enabling it on another having to take place within 24 hours (much less in my experience).

In contrast the UK system seems to place the burden on the customer to arrange keeping their number. This also gives the existing service provider leverage against any switch, which is anti-competitive. Still, as the right to keep the number was one of those nasty, burdensome regulations handed down from Brussels, it's probably only a matter of time until it's revoked and you don't have to worry about switching networks because you won't be able to keep it. That's what "taking back control" is all about, right?

Does it take into account when companies won't let you switch?

I tried to upgrade on Virgin to save money but they point blanked refused as apparently 'I wasn't in the right family of tariffs' so once that contract expires later this year I'm done with them - and downgrading the wifi as well.

The costs of switching

While I would encourage everyone to keep abreast of the average costs of the various services they use, it should also be noted that there are always costs associated with switching: researching, form-filling, etc. Very often the optimal approach is switching tariffs at your existing provider. But that won't make companies like uSwitch very happy.

Value != Cost

uSwitch (et al) can only compare the cost of a deal. They can't compare the value of a deal to a customer. e.g. Does the cheaper provider have worse coverage/performance than your current provider? What about customer services? Technical support?

GiffGaff

I can only get a good signal from O2, and found GiffGaff while searching for a SIM-only contract. I like them because I can terminate with 1 month's notice, and I can change the contract details each month (if appropriate), based on my actual usage for the previous month. The only downside is that calls from other European countries are not inclusive.

Never needed too

If your main / only gripe is price then you threaten to leave unless they match what you've seen / discounted the price etc. Most people I know have started to leave due to price hikes / cheaper elsewhere only for their current provided to match the price or even better it.

Those people (myself included) will be included in these stats (been with Orange / EE over a decade) yet I'm making the same savings that these guys are saying is only possible by switching.

Agree with the principle that signing up and never switching or threatening to leave will cost you, but most of the time retentions / cancellations will drop the price to keep you.

cut to the chase

"The average yearly saving of switching providers is £176, it said."

I call Bullshit.

Not only is that £14.6 per month , which is more than most people spend , and twice what i spend...

...but also the money saving tactic of merely "switching" dosent really hold up for me - unless they are all in a big price fixing league and one says to the other "Right this year you go high , ill go low , see how many idiots you hang on to"

you might save a few pennies if anything - which will be far outweighed , by the errors and effort of switching

Do the maths !

Depending on your provider and your usage patterns, PAYG may be cheaper than SIM-only - especially for low usage.

I'm very light on data usage, and I don't use enough minutes per month to make even the low-end SIM-only contracts worth my while. I rarely spend more than £2 or £3 in a month on 3's 3-2-1 tariff.

I don't WANT to switch providers just for the sake of it.

There are more important things than how much the monthly cost is.

For a start, certain networks I have BLACKLISTED because they gave me such atrocious customer services. Others have limits, packages or problems that I want no part of. So I will gladly pay more to stay exactly where I am at the moment.

Why people should be TOLD to move regularly, I can't fathom. Sure, I can move my broadband to TalkTalk if I want to as well. It'll be cheaper, I guarantee it. But I'd rather stay with what I have, that works, where the company deal with me well and I have no complaints.

If I wasn't happy, I'd move.

What this says is that 1/4 of people are PERFECTLY HAPPY with what they have, even if it costs more than the others.

What organisations like this should be doing is working out why the other 3/4 of people are forever changing. Is it because they must always have the cheapest deal because everything's so expensive? It is because everyone they try is utterly useless and they end up having to move again? Or is because no provider offers what they need (e.g. cheap data roaming) so it's easier to abuse their welcome deals and then move on?

The other thing? I bought my mobile. So I can stick ANY DAMN SIM I like into it, and with PAC's I can move my number across in a couple of days. The fact that I can't be bothered to get a free SIM and do this to go elsewhere tells you exactly what I think of those other places. And you just want me to switch so I can save a few quid? No.

Maybe if you weren't an organisation that PROFITS from my changing constantly, I might listen. Such as, if you were an organisation that cared about improving the customer service and deals available from mobile phone providers.

Do the sums, properly.

5.8 Bn would be £90+ per person, per year, if every single resident of the UK (including the babes in arms and the very elderly) are included.

That's more than I spend annually on mobile phone charges.

They say 3.5M people haven't switched in the last three years, and the average saving if you switch is £176. So if all those people switch, and make that average saving, they save a total of £616M - but USwitch's calculator seems to make that nine times as much. I don't think I'd want to trust a switching site using that sort of arithmetic!

And a lot of those non-switching people, like me, don't even pay that much, so they won't need to switch. Or they will live somewhere (again like me) where outside any operation will do, but the location of the local tower serving several networks is such that indoors I have no coverage on most operators.

Typical hyped-up crap statistics.

And where's all that 'overpayment' going? Is it all to profits distributed by the companies? Or is it actually supporting investment in he networks, and covering the running costs? If even some of it is not clear profit (and I doubt that all that much of it is), then the only effect of everyone switching is that base prices have to go up - or people go out of business, and networks steadily deteriorate - which isn't good for anyone. It's a fundamentally flawed, short-termist position.

Not that people shouldn't switch when it suits them - but this insistence on switching as a Universally Good Thing is only of benefit to the switching site owners. How much are we overpaying *them*, I wonder, on the commission they get from each switcher?

What hassle?

At the end of your contract:

1. Shop around for what should be the best deal

2. Call your existing mobile provider and ask for your PAC as you've seen a better deal

3. If your existing provider offers you something better, take it and forget about it for another 1-2 years. If not, request your PAC.

4. If 'super-retentions' don't call you after a couple of weeks to offer an even better deal than offered at step 3, use the PAC to take your number to the better deal you've seen.

Simples.