Having joined them on Friday, I sought to transfer my old number over too. Monday was meant to be the magic day. It's Wednesday now and I'm still waiting, with an inactive phone.

Absolute cowboys. Good value on the face of it, but if they can't deliver, the value is illusory. They certainly shouldn't make number migration seem so straightforward and quick when it clearly isn't. Had I known this at the time, I would probably have kept my new number supplied at the time of joining. Legions of people on Twitter are currently having the same problem and Giffgaff are in denial about it.

Your right. You'll no doubt get the fan boys saying it's great value for money etc. But it really isn't if you don't have a working phone. I'd rather spend an extra few quid to have proper support, less outages and a better website. That and the fact that O2's 3g signal here is non-existant means I will not be joining Giffgaff. Better the devil you know (T-Mobile ).

Sad but probably true.

This sentence is so true. I left because the Mickey Mouse tin-can and string network (O2) they use to power their service couldn't (and wouldn't) deliver. Sticking with Three as their 3G pees all over O2's poor 2G (let alone 3G) effort here.

As JordanT91 rightly says though be prepared - you'll get the "it's great value for money etc." brigade along in due course, which to be fair it is, but as a previous network told me the following many years ago; free this and free that is all very well, but if you can't actually use it, then it's ultimately pointless.

Best of luck in your endeavours with them in getting your number back.

Never had a problem with them and was with them over a year.People i signed up never had a problem either just bad luck i guess.
For the record im now with 3 who i got an even better deal with and better signal at home.

Thought this thread was about the 1.5 to 2 hr 3G outage today!

i've been a Giffgaff user since June last year, they are good value but i seem to be seeing to many of these issues over on there forums and been a few outages recently. I'm already thinking of switching to 3 myself, if these problems keep up then i won't hesitate to switch to 3.

It's not an extra few quid though, I'm saving over £200 a year by being with giffgaff. I'm not a fanboy, just someone keen on saving money. Here are some equivalent 30 day deals, like the £10 giffgaff goody bag.

giffgaff - £10 - 250 minutes - Unlimited Texts - Unlimited Internet
Three - £15 - 300 minutes - 3000 Texts - Unlimited Internet
Vodafone - £20.50 - 300 minutes - Unlimited Texts - 500MB Internet
o2 - £21.50 - 300 minutes - Unlimited Texts - 250MB Internet
T-Mobile - £34.50 - 300 minutes - 500 Texts - 5GB Internet

When I transferred my number over, I simply got a PAC code, entered it on the giffgaff website under the 'transfer your number' section and the next day, it was done. But I transferred from o2 to giffgaff, so maybe that's why it was smooth for me.

The most important thing for me when I sign up to a network is comms, that means the ability to keep my number active, receive and make calls and full access to data.

Whilst GiffGaff are selling themselves as cheap I dont think they are, because they have sacrificed some seriously key services so that they can drop their prices while still making the same margin as some other "proper" networks.

I think if you havent had a problem then thats good, I wouldnt wish it any other way, but IF you are thinking of joining them, I would not advise it..they are unreliable and judging from online reviews getting those issues and faults resolved is a nightmare

What? they haven't had ANOTHER?

EDIT oh yeah http://community.giffgaff.com/t5/Ser...2/td-p/3655509

A data outage this morning, wow they really are struggling to keep it up, what is that network built on? sellotape and cardboard tubes?

Yes, I too also noticed the data outage this morning.

What worries me more is what the CEO said after one major outage. As the title of the article says - "too expensive to prevent it, says CEO":

http://crave.cnet.co.uk/mobiles/giff...-ceo-50007389/

If the CEO of giffgaff talks of doubling prices to provide the contingency to prevent a future failure in a MVNO owned by the world's third biggest mobile communications organisation, you'd have to wonder whether 3's £15 all-you-can-eat offer is also realistic.

Well Three have made a profit now 2 quarters in a row. They saw an 18% year-on-year increase in customers and a 14% increase in revenues, that increase in customers is significant.

The average unlimited data account uses just over 1 gig, so it is profitable I think, although obviously the £15 PAYG isn't very profitable compared to contract customers.

You have to bear in mind they are selling handsets, selling insurance, people are making paid calls like 0845, international, premium rate, and other things too. Generally things seem to be going well and the reliability is there, I don't see the network going down all the time and prolonged outages or them not paying to fix single points of failure.

I work in IT myself, and there's a thing called cost to serve, which is how much it costs to provide service to each customer. The objective is to provide a reliable service with a low cost to serve, which per user might be £4 per month.

When you have 8 million customers like Three your cost to serve goes down dramatically because the cost is spread over more users, so expensive pieces of network equipment which cost 50k for example you can afford a fail over device.

When you only have 100,000 customers an extra 50k device would cost considerably more, and to build out a proper HA network costs more money, so it's difficult to justify for small user bases if you still want to turn profit.

There are a number of operators trading at similar prices to GiffGaff, and Three is just one of them. To my knowledge, none of these other 'value' providers have had the issues GiffGaff have. There is obviously something specifically wrong at GiffGaff.

To be fair to them, while the network outages are unfortunate, they do happen to all networks - even those charging 'premium' prices.

What is indicating to me that GiffGaff are a bit out of their depth at the moment is the recurring issues with their website, and number porting. They don't seem to have enough staff behind the scenes to keep up with administration.

It's the frequency of issues and the time to fix though. Every time you go on the giffgaff forums to the service alert forum there are always pinned issues to do with buying goodybags, data issues, APN issues, network down, porting issues, contact an agent issues, credit or balance issues.

Funny how this does not filter through to mainstream forums....unless it's being continually repeated by one of a small band of Giffgaff haters who are well known to support another network.

I have experienced no problems with GiffGaff and will soon port my number to them for primary use having tested the network on a secondary basis as I don't need to update my handset presently.

Said it before and will say it aagain, with no commmitment Giffgaff is well worth a try and unlike others all you can loose is a single months payment.

So in what way is it unlike others? Can you not do PAYG for 1 month with all the other networks?

If you think I'm a hater you are wrong, I'm open minded to them and have tested and tried the network. I think we've all seen the amount of issues they have had though of late and to brush those under the carpet and pretend they aren't there just highlights that you are biassed / blinkered.

Wave you are aware of today's outage presumably, a 1/2 to 2 hours data outage this morning to add to the catalogue of errors.

I would agree with this, I've discussed and criticised other networks.

I think it's a case of Wave shooting the messenger. I didn't start this thread, users are coming here and posting about Giffgaff and the issues with reliability.

They really have claimed the award for least reliable network or MVNO to date. I know a lot of people rely on their phones and want a service that is as reliable and trusty as possible.

I have had a read at a fair number of the comments about the data issue today and most I browsed were happy about the communication that was posted and the speed that service was resumed at.

GiffGaff as a no commitment network don't need anyone to highlight issues to damage them as their customers can leave within days if the level of service is not up to their expectations.

They will no doubt continue to have growing pains but they have the best incentive of all to rectify them quickly as they have no hold over any customers.

That doesn't really help people like quizbuff2000 who have had their porting screwed and are attempting to recover their number, does it?

As a GiffGaff member, perhaps you should try assisting them and pointing to the correct place to get their issue sorted, rather than attempting to derail their thread with more Three vitrol.

I love the way you make it sound like Giffgaff are the only PAYG network, again nothing there that wouldn't apply to Talk Mobile, Tesco, Lebara etc, all of which generally provide a solid and reliable level of service.

It's extremely rare for their topup systems not to work, or for them to have prolonged outages, data issues, contact centre issues, porting issues. These just don't seem to happen on all the other PAYG networks, maybe once in a blue moon, but not to the frequency of the Giffgaff issues, which didn't start last week, they have been going on for a long time now.

Contact an Agent!!

Secret Squirrel wouldn't help at the moment.

Growing pains?

The porting issues are not growing pains, they're symbolic of amateurs trying to punch above their weight.

Top post.

I was wondering how long it would take for wave to turn up and call the kettle black.
Thine Wonk at least doesn't mention things that are OT, only when relevant. I remember in a recent thread about giffgaff, wave himself was the first to bring up three (though not mention them by name) and bash them.

For the record, I have no bias to any network, I simply want to get what I want at the lowest prices I can. For me, other than giffgaff not allowing tethering, their package is ideal; I am a low minutes user, my texts have been replaced by whatsapping so I mainly want a low cost data plan with some minutes and text - the £10 goodybag is ideal for me. Thus I WANT giffgaff to be good so I can stick with them and I have praised them in the past for having personally received good customer service prompt port ins and port outs. But to be honest, having had good customer service means I've needed it, means there have been problems. Once my goodybag hadn't renewed on time (they had account problems) and so my payg credit started going down as my phone did things automatically. I then restricted use of my phone so I couldn't lose any more payg credit. They refunded me an amount so I could buy a goodybag but it shouldn't happen in the first place.

But the reality is they have not delivered for me. Frequently I can't get data to work even when I have good 3G or HSPA signal. The data speeds are slow. They had their outage. They've very regularly had problems with people's accounts, people's porting, billing etc. They began as "true" unlimited but now they're going down the same path as the rest with FUP, detrimental usage etc but still continuing to use the unlimited tagline that they use to lambast bigger networks for.

People like wave and giffgaff want to have their cake and eat it when it comes to the marketing: on the one hand promising that they are reliable as backed by a large international telecoms firm but then the other half of the time excusing giffgaff as a startup so we have to allow them their lack of backups, regular problems etc. You can't have it both ways. Especially when other MVNOs don't get these problems. Before being taken over by Virgin Media, Virgin Mobile used to win awards all the time for great customer service and reliability.

I have been on and off with giffgaff for the past two years and I'm still with them right now due to the price and it's convenient as I'll be travelling soon so I won't top up for those months. But once I'm more settled, something like the £12 sim-only plan from Three looks more appealing or if I start using less data perhaps the £8 from Talk Mobile or something.