Re: Hmmmm

I think you're mistaken if you believe that any one company is better than the other.

I've had horrendous experiences with Three, as have a lot of people I know. And it covers all areas - customer service, contracts, coverage, you name it.

You can't pretend today that there's a magic company who'll solve all your problems forever. It's always a compromise of what experience you get personally. For me, Virgin have been wonderful for everything from phone, cable, mobile, etc. which is why I'm on them. Absolutely everyone I know whinges about them constantly but I can't say I've really had any trouble with them. T-Mobile were good to me for mobiles (and Virgin piggy-backs on their signal). But Three threatened to sue me for a phone that never arrived and friends with Three phones can't get a signal in many areas at all (T-Mobile, on the other hand, has given me a signal everywhere I've ever been, even in the Highlands). One of them, we joke because she always gets cut off 20 seconds into the conversation and we keep telling her to learn how to use a phone box. Orange had an horrendous reputation amongst my family, as do BT / O2.

It's the same with everything - phones, broadband, banks, insurance companies, you name it. One lot of people will never touch them again and one lot will *only* consider them. And, depending on who you ask, where they live, what kind of house they live in, how stroppy they are to customer services, what date they joined, etc. you get different answers for what's best for them.

Maintain your own personal blacklist, like I do, but eventually you'll find yourself on a company that everyone else keeps telling you are awful and you'll get nothing but good service out of them. I will never touch NatWest ever again on the basis of one incident years ago (who cares if they've changed - they had their chance and didn't want to know), and HSBC are fast pushing themselves out of consideration since they laughed (literally) the last time I asked them for a mortgage (and this was just before the mortgage crash, and we got a mortgage from the shop NEXT DOOR to our usual HSBC branch, at lower rates, we never missed a mortgage payment, and ended up paying it off after three years at profit to us and them... who's laughing now?) and I deliberately went and wasted an hour of their manager's time because they charged me for one of those "your cheque cleared a microsecond after the payment you made three days after you handed the cheque in" moments (they refused to tell me if I'd cost them more than the "fine" they imposed for their slow systems to process a cheque in the modern age, so I stayed another 20 minutes just to make sure).

My girlfriend hated HSBC, so she moved to Halifax but my feelings weren't strong enough to do that, and Halifax are being a bit of a pain but are much nicer to her. But I guarantee I can find people who've gone the other way for similar reasons.

If you want to see if a company is worth it, use them. Personally, my best ever ISP service came from PlusNet, but I had innumerable problems with BT (and, strangely, BT owned PlusNet for the last three years before I moved onto Virgin - not for any problem I had with PlusNet). My best mobile service comes from Virgin, better even than the T-Mobile that they use as a backend (how is that possible?). I've worked my way through most of the major banks over the years and still not found one I "like", just one I can tolerate.

Ignore what others have said. Seriously. Otherwise you become like my ex-father-in-law who thought that anything that Which magazine recommended must be the best thing ever and would pay literally 5-10 times the price necessary to get the exact model they recommended OF EVERYTHING. Still, he had a never-ending range of problems with them, but he never saw that.

Get yourself a SIM of the other networks on PAYG (hell, they're £1 each now, if that, and most will post you a few free ones). Judge for yourself. Pick the winner.