GiffGaff blames O2 gaffe for mobile outage
People's network loses its people
Agentless Backup is Not a Myth
GiffGaff is failing in its mission to be "the people's network" after denying connectivity to a significant number of people over the last couple of days – but apparently it's all O2's fault.
The outage started yesterday morning, with certain GiffGaff customers losing all voice and data services for reasons which remain unclear. The company promptly blamed its hosting network, O2, but despite collecting the names and numbers of those lacking connectivity it has not managed to do anything about it.
GiffGaff is owned by O2, as well as being a virtual operator on O2's network. Its unique selling point is that prices and tariffs are decided upon publicly, within its public forums, and open to comment from anyone who feels like pitching in.
The claim is that GiffGaff is run by its customers, but the reality is that while sales and support are provided by customers, business decisions are still made by company – though it insists that it takes on board customer comments.
Customers are rewarded for their contribution to sales and support with pre-paid credit: £5 for connecting up another customer, £2 if one of those customers signs up someone else, and pennies for answering support questions and/or being an active member of the community.
But none of that helps run the actual network, which still needs engineers to keep it operational, and while the approaching-two-day outage may only be affecting a small number of people, it is still unacceptable for any mobile network – even one run by its customers.
COMMENTS
What a poor article.
GiffGaff have had an outage. O2 are the technical provider, so maybe they are to blame.
Does it mean their entire business model is flawed? No.
+1 very happy GG customer here
Cheap amd Cheerful
GiffGaff is not really run by the customers. Its just a company with low operating costs because they do not have call centres or a huge advertising budget. These lower costs are passed onto the customer.
Customers can help othjer customers out via a forum instead of a call centre. Not having a call centre where someone reads from a script that does not cover your problem, promises tech support get back to you, but never do, etc. I don't miss those.
I have been using GiffGaff and its average, but then so were all the other mobile companies I have used previously. But its cheaper.
Oh and I have not been affected by the outage.
anon for obvious reasons
This is the network where support forum questions are answered very, very quickly. And answered correctly a little while later... then flooded with more wrong answers.
I actually thought there were signs of improvement last weekend, in the thread I remember at least the wrong answers spit out by cash seeking freeloaders managed to have *nothing* to do with the question asked, with no chance of leading the poor user astray. The 3rd response actually answered the correct question AND got the answer right. Sad that that's worth commenting on as an improvement.
One thing giffgaff teaches us is just how stupid and greedy people can be.
And how incompetently a network can be run. I carry another SIM because O2 coverage is so unreliable and even when it works the voice quality, data throughput and SMS delivery time on giffgaff is shockingly poor. Otherwise I might have noticed the outage!
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