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Three phases out "The One Plan" and Unlimited tethering


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Old 20-07-2015, 22:14
d123
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I don't believe anyone can be considered to have abused something that Three actively used and promoted to acquire customers.
Jon, people have posted quite boastfully (here and other forums) of how they had deliberately left it downloading 24/7 to try and get to the 1000GB or how they had managed to use 400GB+ "because they can", others boasted that they had a cheap Android handset permemently plugged in and used as a hot spot in a student house or similar and allowed open access to the hotspot to anyone who wanted to use it.

Most of that is way beyond normal use.
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Old 20-07-2015, 23:02
jabbamk1
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Three never actively promoted tethering and the 1000GB limit.
This is revisionist history at it's finest.

In early 2010 the concept of "The One Plan" was created by Marc Allera as a way to create an "all rounder" package that would increase the number of subscribers across the business in order to hit their target of 10 million customers.

What they wanted to do was create a high value plan that would be above all others and in many ways would be a no brainer for the average consumer. What this means is that if a customer had a choice between a £20 plan and a £30 plan they wanted the customer to choose the £30 plan purely because of all the added value they were getting. Also they wanted to give customers a unique reason to join them.

Later in 2010 once the risks were calculated the full One Plan launched with unlimited data (up from 1GB) and tethering was advertised as included with the plan.

With the One plan you can also connect your phone to other devices to get onto the internet. This is called tethering or using your phone as modem.
Three had worked out that they would be able to support a 60% jump in data usage every year and still support the One Plan and by keeping the One Plan as the highest priced and only tariff to include tethering it meant that margin was good for Three who were able to profit off the plan.

Now of course at the time Three wasn't really expecting many people to use more than 80GB so placed a soft cap here, once people started hitting 80GB they moved it up to 450GB then eventually 1000GB. This high margin proposition propelled Three forward in allowing them to invest in their network and increase the number of users towards 10 million. Tools like trafficsense were actually very good in managing the network but ultimately it did start to get a bit out of hand where a significant amount of data was being used by a small portion of users.

Once the target was hit there was a lot of pressure from Hong Kong for Three to remain profitable and start cutting back in a lot of areas. A number of changes were made internally, one of them being the removal of the one plan with unlimited tethering. The reasons behind this were as follows.
1. Data usage was increasing and forecasted to increase further.
2. Pressure from the parent company in wanting Three to move more towards premium value added brand rather than budget. It's why AYCE is still there as a selling point but tethering is limited. There was a lot of pressure to monetise data more hence the tiered plans + limited tethering + price increases.

Going back to the original point, Tethering was pushed as a feature, as was using as much data as you want. It was an integral part of getting customers to buy into the plan. Three insisted they'd never stop selling the one plan but at the end of the day they had to in order to add value to their network.
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Old 21-07-2015, 00:47
Jack_Wilson2
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Jon, people have posted quite boastfully (here and other forums) of how they had deliberately left it downloading 24/7 to try and get to the 1000GB or how they had managed to use 400GB+ "because they can", others boasted that they had a cheap Android handset permemently plugged in and used as a hot spot in a student house or similar and allowed open access to the hotspot to anyone who wanted to use it.

Most of that is way beyond normal use.
Doesn't matter if you're using it as a hotspot or not you can still consume exactly the same amount just on mobile handset use. If you put a SD card in your smartphone and download GB's of stuff onto it and transfer it to a computer then clear the SD card and start again I bet you could accumulate some hundred GB's.

It doesn't matter if you're getting 30+meg as quite obviously traffic sense isn't restricting you indicating that there isn't congestion or not many users are using the mast... It's when you start to see your speeds decrease from 30meg to 6-8meg that's when you know its time to stop downloading stuff.

It does my head in when people say hotspot usage on unlimited data is bad... it's exactly the same as if you was offering unlimited data on the handset without the hotspot usage..

I admit I used to download hundreds I remember when I was re-installing windows around 8 times a month and re-downloading stuff over and over again and yeah it was quite high usage it was around the 500-600GB+ usage. But you'll be pleased to know I average around 10GB per month now that's enough for my World Of Warcraft and other games and a few YouTube videos here and there.
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Old 21-07-2015, 01:08
jonmorris
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This is revisionist history at it's finest.

In early 2010 the concept of "The One Plan" was created by Marc Allera as a way to create an "all rounder" package that would increase the number of subscribers across the business in order to hit their target of 10 million customers.

What they wanted to do was create a high value plan that would be above all others and in many ways would be a no brainer for the average consumer. What this means is that if a customer had a choice between a £20 plan and a £30 plan they wanted the customer to choose the £30 plan purely because of all the added value they were getting. Also they wanted to give customers a unique reason to join them.

Later in 2010 once the risks were calculated the full One Plan launched with unlimited data (up from 1GB) and tethering was advertised as included with the plan.



Three had worked out that they would be able to support a 60% jump in data usage every year and still support the One Plan and by keeping the One Plan as the highest priced and only tariff to include tethering it meant that margin was good for Three who were able to profit off the plan.

Now of course at the time Three wasn't really expecting many people to use more than 80GB so placed a soft cap here, once people started hitting 80GB they moved it up to 450GB then eventually 1000GB. This high margin proposition propelled Three forward in allowing them to invest in their network and increase the number of users towards 10 million. Tools like trafficsense were actually very good in managing the network but ultimately it did start to get a bit out of hand where a significant amount of data was being used by a small portion of users.

Once the target was hit there was a lot of pressure from Hong Kong for Three to remain profitable and start cutting back in a lot of areas. A number of changes were made internally, one of them being the removal of the one plan with unlimited tethering. The reasons behind this were as follows.
1. Data usage was increasing and forecasted to increase further.
2. Pressure from the parent company in wanting Three to move more towards premium value added brand rather than budget. It's why AYCE is still there as a selling point but tethering is limited. There was a lot of pressure to monetise data more hence the tiered plans + limited tethering + price increases.

Going back to the original point, Tethering was pushed as a feature, as was using as much data as you want. It was an integral part of getting customers to buy into the plan. Three insisted they'd never stop selling the one plan but at the end of the day they had to in order to add value to their network.
Spot on, and thanks for backing my somewhat shorter statement up with the facts in far better detail than I could have given.

A big problem for Three was when it decided to discount the One Plan by £10, making it ridiculously cheap. I doubt one single One Plan customer paying £15 a month would argue that it shouldn't have been more expensive!

Three was crazy to lose £10 a month, or £120 a year, from every subscriber signing up - but wanted to boost the numbers. It did, but what a heavy price to pay.

I wonder if Three should have also considered doing what it does in some other markets, where after a certain limit you're speed capped. I'd still regard that as unlimited data, because it keeps flowing, but after 50, 100GB or whatever, the speeds could have been capped to 1 or 2 megabits.

To repeat, Three said on Facebook and other social media, as well as shop staff, that you could use your One Plan account for anything. It was very naive to think that a handful of people (which would then grow) wouldn't decide to start using it for everything around the home.

BUT THE POINT IS; THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT THREE DID!
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Old 21-07-2015, 02:06
cooler
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Doesn't matter if you're using it as a hotspot or not you can still consume exactly the same amount just on mobile handset use. If you put a SD card in your smartphone and download GB's of stuff onto it and transfer it to a computer then clear the SD card and start again I bet you could accumulate some hundred GB's.
Surely it's not a question whether it's possible to consume the same amount on a handset. It's whether that is likely to happen, which it isn't because using an SD card on a smartphone is only limited to certain things. You can't watch video streaming services like iPlayer on a good sized screen, download windows updates, etc.. as you can when tethering.

It does my head in when people say hotspot usage on unlimited data is bad... it's exactly the same as if you was offering unlimited data on the handset without the hotspot usage..
I don't see how it's exactly the same. There are far more possibilities to use data via tethering than their is on a handset as people can tether to games consoles, smart TV, etc... Plus the fact tethering lets you tether to multiple devices at once, increases the likelihood of high data consumption compared to handset use where you can only use data on that one device at any one time.

If it is exactly the same then why was there such an outcry when Three announced last year that unlimited tethering was ending. If an SD card was a good alternative, people would have said who cares lets get the SD card out when unlimited tethering ends.
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Old 21-07-2015, 09:21
Chris1973
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The biggest problem that I found with '3' was the fact that on the one plan via tethering I used to get 10mbps speeds from 3G quite routinely, (even in a rural area with crap ADSL where a lot of local people were doing the same thing). I also had a '3' 10GB MBB Sim which I used as a back up, and which came in quite handy for a couple of months when the one plan was eventually scrapped.

However, this MBB sim refused to go above 6mbps - (often averaging 4mbps), when used in the same place as the aforementioned one plan sim, which had given 10mbps for years. This stayed the same, whether I used the MBB sim in a dongle, mifi or more lately, a 4G Mifi, (indoor or outdoor) - whatever I did I could not get that MBB connection to go above 6mbps.

I cancelled and moved to EE's 15GB Monthly Sim, and magically my 3G speeds returned to around 12mbps when used in exactly the same Mifi's and Dongles as the previous '3' MBB sim. Recently i've been able to get EE 4G from a distant mast, giving around 30mbps from a weak signal, so now i'm getting even more value for my £20 / month and the 100GB x 2 Sim offers

I'm not into conspiracy theories nor am I suggesting for one minute that '3' throttle their MBB sims, however all that I do know is that my speeds were reduced, for whatever reason on every occasion that I used my MBB sim, rather than the One Plan tethered from a cheap Chinese 3G phone, and as a result of this experience this left me feeling short changed and so I cancelled both contracts with '3' and moved to a different network.

Even when on the One Plan I never used more than about 10GB / month tethered, so I don't consider myself to have ever abused the service at any point, but either way, the combination of the lack of a one plan replacement phone tariff offering 10GB - 20GB of tethering, and the poor MBB essentially lost them two contracts.
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Old 21-07-2015, 10:06
Jack_Wilson2
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Surely it's not a question whether it's possible to consume the same amount on a handset. It's whether that is likely to happen, which it isn't because using an SD card on a smartphone is only limited to certain things. You can't watch video streaming services like iPlayer on a good sized screen, download windows updates, etc.. as you can when tethering.
It's still possible you can't offer a unlimited data service and not expect users to use 100GB+ of course you're going to get the odd few which consume high amounts of data... They'll be some that will use it as a home broadband alternative, they'll be some bypassing tethering restrictions etc... All you need to do regarding iPlayer is to get a cable which will simply mirror the image onto a 40inch tv through HDMI or use a media server to stream it over AC and you can even do 4K.

I don't see how it's exactly the same. There are far more possibilities to use data via tethering than their is on a handset as people can tether to games consoles, smart TV, etc... Plus the fact tethering lets you tether to multiple devices at once, increases the likelihood of high data consumption compared to handset use where you can only use data on that one device at any one time.
It's exactly the same because no matter how many devices you're connected to 1800mhz LTE will only do a certain speed depending on backhaul and congestion and lets be honest it's hardly the best LTE spectrum available also Three hard cap the data speeds to '50meg' according to there traffic management document. I've seen people get higher but not much higher. So it doesn't matter how many devices are connected to it you won't get much higher than 50meg in better than good conditions... If more devices are connected to it I.E a smart tv is streaming 1080p youtube videos (which you can do on your phone - and mirror it to your tv) the other person connected to the hotspot playing a game such as CS:GO or whatever will suffer high ping loss in other words it will become more a less unusable. (That was just a example). Yeah it may increase the likelyhood of using high amounts of data but as you pointed it it's down it's based on how the average use is and how people use it normally but it certainly doesn't mean mobile phone users can't consume the same amount!

Also just out of curiosity does anyone know what the average data consumption in a month is now?
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Old 21-07-2015, 10:14
jonmorris
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Three no longer caps at 50Mbps. Given its capacity issues, you have to wonder why.
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Old 21-07-2015, 10:17
Jack_Wilson2
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Three no longer caps at 50Mbps. Given its capacity issues, you have to wonder why.
Given the fact they love AYCE too...

http://support.three.co.uk/mobiledoc...s_document.pdf

The traffic management policy still says ;-

What are the download/upload limits or data usage caps on this product?

We provide a maximum
speed of 50 Mbps on all
plans and tariffs.

?
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Old 21-07-2015, 10:17
Carl_Boys
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I've got home broadband and disable mobile date when home, use a lot of tethering but max usage for me is 30gb in the last 2 years in a month. Average is 25ish.
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Old 21-07-2015, 10:20
moox
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Doesn't matter if you're using it as a hotspot or not you can still consume exactly the same amount just on mobile handset use. If you put a SD card in your smartphone and download GB's of stuff onto it and transfer it to a computer then clear the SD card and start again I bet you could accumulate some hundred GB's.
Lots of things are possible, it's about whether it is likely. Almost no one will be running torrent clients or downloading hundreds of GBs per month onto their phones.
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Old 21-07-2015, 13:02
jonmorris
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Given the fact they love AYCE too...

http://support.three.co.uk/mobiledoc...s_document.pdf

The traffic management policy still says ;-

What are the download/upload limits or data usage caps on this product?

We provide a maximum
speed of 50 Mbps on all
plans and tariffs.

?
I do wonder how much joined up thinking there is at Three at times. Three stated the cap was dropped a long time ago, and told a bunch of journalists at the event announcing 800/VoLTE. These were the people responsible for rolling out 4G and maintaining the network, so I trust them completely - especially as I've topped 50Mbps in a few places, which proves they're right.

But the people who write the T&Cs and generally update the website, or even those who come up with the tariffs/discounts/promotions don't seem to communicate very effectively.

I'm sure the engineering people don't get on with the marketing people. Just like when the marketing people sprung the free evening/weekend calls on everyone when one2one launched in 1993. Story is that the technical people only found out very late in the day, and immediately pointed out that it was going to be a nightmare waiting to happen - as very quickly proven.

The only upside is that one2one had to invest heavily in building its network to cope, which probably helped lead to a large number of sites that paid off when the later T-Mobile started rolling out 3G, and now 4G.
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Old 21-07-2015, 13:15
lightspeed2398
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When you're in a big company ensuring stuff is "joined up" is always going to be hard. When it's between internal departments it should be fine though. People should know who to talk to before launching or changing something. Where I work one of the problems is about joining up between outsourced contractors and internal teams. I've now had no internet on my work Blackberry for 6 days because it's "company policy" from 10 years ago and they've only enforced it on the new o2 SIMs, I wrote the bloody policy 10 years ago and it's not bloody that. It still says in the instructions to add a '*' to the end of a number if it's personal when we've been on some unlimited package for 10 months. Glad I got out of that bloody department. /rant

I've got over 50 myself now though a few times. I've noticed that on most masts it's very sector dependent the speeds you get. Probably just the congestion on one side. But there's one near me that on two of the three sectors it's 20Mbps and about 55Mbps if you're on the third, same on EE but double those speeds.
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Old 21-07-2015, 13:19
Daveoc64
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It does my head in when people say hotspot usage on unlimited data is bad... it's exactly the same as if you was offering unlimited data on the handset without the hotspot usage...
You just don't get it.

The networks can quite happily give away unlimited data (or even capped plans with very large amounts of data for that matter) for handset use as they know that the vast majority of people will never be able to use it in an "excessive" way.

*The average person doesn't run torrents on their phone.
*The average person doesn't stream HD video continually.
*The average person doesn't download huge files and then copy them to a PC.

This is the principle behind any offering which is "unlimited". Pizza Hut knows that most people aren't going to eat more than a few slices of pizza from their unlimited lunchtime buffet. The odd person might have more, but that's going to be balanced out by the odd person that eats very little.

The limit on what people consume with the buffet is how much people can eat in the time they are in the restaurant. If they changed it so that you could take extra slices home with you, they'd have to make a lot more pizza and they'd lose money.

The same principle applies with mobile data - if you can't use it for tethering, the vast majority of people have no way to use a lot of it.

tethering was advertised as included with the plan
Barely.

The one line you quote is hardly a neon lit billboard.

Tethering was and still is simply a bonus you get with the plan.
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Old 21-07-2015, 13:20
cooler
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The biggest problem that I found with '3' was the fact that on the one plan via tethering I used to get 10mbps speeds from 3G quite routinely, (even in a rural area with crap ADSL where a lot of local people were doing the same thing). I also had a '3' 10GB MBB Sim which I used as a back up, and which came in quite handy for a couple of months when the one plan was eventually scrapped.

However, this MBB sim refused to go above 6mbps - (often averaging 4mbps), when used in the same place as the aforementioned one plan sim, which had given 10mbps for years. This stayed the same, whether I used the MBB sim in a dongle, mifi or more lately, a 4G Mifi, (indoor or outdoor) - whatever I did I could not get that MBB connection to go above 6mbps.
...
Maybe it was a local mast issue.

Was your connection software displaying HSPA+ or were you getting only HSPA?

Im on the Three 10GB MBB plan. If anything, it's faster than the One Plan via tethering. Last week, I downloaded a programme from iPlayer. The download speed was about 600 kb/s. When I was on the One Plan via tethering, the fastest download speed I got on iPlayer was around 400 kb/s, but it was usually between about 230 kb/s to 330 kb/s.
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Old 21-07-2015, 13:30
jonmorris
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Tethering was and still is simply a bonus you get with the plan.
Three has certainly tried to play tethering down of late, but it was something being used to help sell phones - and shop staff were almost certainly suggesting you could abuse it as much as you wanted, as it was truly unlimited.

Three went very big on having a go at the other networks claiming unlimited when it wasn't. It certainly helped earn Three a good reputation for being a network for data, as proven by the success of the mobile broadband products around the time of netbooks becoming all the rage.

I believe Three outsold dongles on other networks by a massive margin.
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Old 21-07-2015, 14:09
jabbamk1
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But the people who write the T&Cs and generally update the website, or even those who come up with the tariffs/discounts/promotions don't seem to communicate very effectively.
Yeh, communication is terrible internally.
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Old 21-07-2015, 14:21
WelshBluebird
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When it's between internal departments it should be fine though.
It seems many times it isn't though. And not just in Three. Many larger companies really do struggle with internal communication. So much so that sometimes communication via a third party outside the company usually gives the results quicker!
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Old 21-07-2015, 17:04
d123
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Doesn't matter if you're using it as a hotspot or not you can still consume exactly the same amount just on mobile handset use.
Illogical and wrong. So in your world someone putting a sim into a phone permemently connected to the mains and leaving the hotspot open 24/7 for anyone to use in a 5 occupant student house will use the same as Joe Bloggs with his Galaxy J who only uses data on the phone?

LOL
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Old 21-07-2015, 18:46
Orbitalzone
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JabbaMK1 thanks for taking the time to give such a detailed response.

The pizza analogy is good, all you can eat pizza is not likely to bankrupt a pizza shop as the average stomach cannot eat forever during one sitting. But Three gave the same offer for data, where you could leave the phone tethered continously forever and would never fill up. It was a risk they obviously thought worth taking to get them to the next level.
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Old 21-07-2015, 20:00
jonmorris
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In some ways it can be considered a success, given Three is seen as the network for data by a lot of people (especially younger people and the tech savvy ones) and has probably gained a lot of subscribers as a result.

The failure is that when it became too popular and the network started to suffer, the way to solve the problem didn't go down well - forcing people off an 'old' tariff, which is pretty rare in the industry (if not a first).

But the way Three has taken ages to do it, it has actually managed to avoid much media attention. And by using the argument that it is to stop abuse of the network that slows things down for everyone else, it's actually likely to be seen as a positive move. Despite being a problem Three created all by itself.
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Old 21-07-2015, 20:03
d123
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JabbaMK1 thanks for taking the time to give such a detailed response.

The pizza analogy is good, all you can eat pizza is not likely to bankrupt a pizza shop as the average stomach cannot eat forever during one sitting. But Three gave the same offer for data, where you could leave the phone tethered continously forever and would never fill up. It was a risk they obviously thought worth taking to get them to the next level.
To complete the pizza analogy, some Three users paid for all you can eat pizza and then started handing pizzas out the window to all their friends while still pretending they were the only one eating.
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Old 21-07-2015, 20:46
cooler
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To complete the pizza analogy, some Three users paid for all you can eat pizza and then started handing pizzas out the window to all their friends while still pretending they were the only one eating.
Pretending to who?
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Old 21-07-2015, 20:51
jabbamk1
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To complete the pizza analogy, some Three users paid for all you can eat pizza and then started handing pizzas out the window to all their friends while still pretending they were the only one eating.
Which was allowed by the terms and conditions....

Tethering was included in the one plan.

I'm not saying people didn't abuse it, of course they did. But Three made it pretty clear that you can use as much as you want (up to 1000GB) tethering or on the phone and it wouldn't cost a penny extra.

Unlike some companies that said unlimited and then throttled you or cut you off after a certain amount.
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Old 21-07-2015, 20:57
jabbamk1
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Spot on, and thanks for backing my somewhat shorter statement up with the facts in far better detail than I could have given.
JabbaMK1 thanks for taking the time to give such a detailed response.
No worries.

It really just came down to Three moving from a budget brand to a premium value added brand and in order to complete that transition a number of changes were made. The One Plan wouldn't have been replaced if this change wasn't pushed so much from Hong Kong along with pressure to make other changes to increase profit.

It's the reason you see some very key members of staff leave Three last year. They didn't leave by themselves if you know what I mean.
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