It is a pity that 3 have not been more transparent regarding this issue as the text alerts seem to have caused confusion. The company need to make clear which tariffs are being discontinued and for what users. They should also provide details of the alternative tariffs available to affected customers after the date of discontinuation in advance so they can make up their minds if they want to remain with 3. It would also be helpful if the company could provide the reason for the discontinuation of the affected tariffs so that customers could understand why they were being withdrawn.

As usual personalisation WILL NOT be responded to.............

Yeh yeh you hate Three.

We get it.

I'm not saying I disagree with you, I actually agree with you on this point. But could you not be so annoying and spout so much rubbish about everything all the time. Maybe go outside or something. Just make your point and let it be, no need to keep posting it over and over and over. I know you get a kick out of annoying everyone on here though and nothing I say will stop you. Hopefully the mods will ban you again like they have over 5 times before.

And yes, go ahead and edit your post about how you're going to ignore the "personal crap etc...

So that's a no then? It seems speculation and hearsay that all legacy tarriffs are being discontinued.

But the state of ADSL near where you live is not 3's concern - their concern is the performance of their network and their overall profitability. Hopefully BT does something near you eventually through the BDUK programme (or the separate one for Cornwall if you live there). I've had 80Mbps for almost 3 years and I'm very much in a rural area (couldn't get ADSL until 2005)

As I said, the one plan is not a permanent internet connection - and if you've been able to use it successfully for the last couple of years then great, but 3 never sold it on that basis (people using it that way are part of the reason why 3 are now withdrawing it).

They probably could have improved their mobile broadband offerings, but TBH I doubt any new plans are going to be as cheap/good value as the unlimited tethering was.

There are reasons why 3 have not publicised it and are going down the route of telling everyone in batches - mostly to stop the call centres being flooded with questions and arguments (especially if there's some dedicated team handling this, as has been suggested). Everyone who will be affected is going to be told at some point. Raising prices and removing value is going to a bit of a large pill to swallow though.

A number of people, not just on the one plan, will be contacted and moved over to a new tariff. For some it'll be a benefit. for example £12.90 for unlimited data and no tethering will now become £13 for unlimited data, 4GB tethering and free 0800 numbers.

For some it'll be a disadvantage as they will lose unlimited tethering which may be essential or they may end up having to move onto a plan they don't want to.

Fully Agree. Its pretty cheeky of Three to send out text messages and expect customers to ring and chase around after THEM like some kind of performing seal.

If they want to retain me as a customer then they'll have to put the effort in, I wont be chasing them. In the meantime there is several weeks of the One plan left, i'll be using it to find other alternatives.


Inevitably there are people who will never even have an ADSL connection, those who rent or have retired to mobile homes and boats for 10 months of the year, and those with short term property rental agreements of 6 months, and who don't want to take out the (often obligatory) 12 or 18 month contracts for phone and ADSL.

You are 100% right, its not '3's fault regarding the state of ADSL and it shouldnt' fall to them to supplement ADSL issues, but when launching the original model if they didn't factor that into the equation, then its pretty poor planning and very shortsighted, to the point where they probably shouldn't have introduced it at all. You won't get any argument from me on the basis that we shouldn't have to resort to using phones to connect our homes to the internet - I would be the first person to cancel my mobile contract entirely if I had a decent ADSL connection.

I suspect that even those who are dead against any form of tethering or Home Internet substitution whould themselves be the first to engage in it, if their home internet fell to 512k and dropped out every 15 - 20 minutes, and nobody did anything to address it and there really were no other alternatives.


Unfortunately they have given up, there are around 60 properties and 30 businesses on the local exchange, so its not earmarked for any kind of upgrade, nor will it ever pay them to bother paying for the extra infrastructure (We didn't get ADSL until 2007!). BT representatives met with people from the area along with representatives from one of the rural internet campaign groups between 2008 and 2013 and never reached any kind of resolution, the frequent disconnections and lower than 2mbps speeds were blamed on the proximity of overhead power lines to the telephone poles, and with neither Western Power or BT willing to move their infrastructure its never to be resolved.

Thus it was unofficially recommended that the entire village use mobile broadband, remarkably those of us on '3' get 10mbps+ speeds consistantly and despite the entire area using it as a home broadband subtitute, no kind of traffic sense or congestion has been noted.

AFAIK only the One Plan is affected because it allows unlimited data with unlimited tethering. Maybe some others are being discontinued at the same time in a tidying up exercise but the main focus seems to be to apply a limit to tethering for all 3 customers using mobiles. Some have pointed out that they are also concerned that they will also loose their 3 to 3 minutes and will have a reduction in call minutes but I am not 100% sure what is being offered as a replacement to the One Plan when contracts are out of commitment after the 5th January 2015.

3's manner dealing with this issue reminds me of how some budget airlines deal with flight cancellations. They don't announce them to all the passengers at one time and prefer to speak to small batches of ticket holders to avoid commotion!

Can we all ignore wavejock who is just adding further confusion to the thread. (As always).

The information in all his posts is wrong.

Apart from the bits you agree with. Your getting more annoying than he is.

Stick to all the useful, interesting and informative posts that you do regularly, rather than this childish nonsense.

You've got 114 posts in two years. I take it you don't know wavejock very well. Have a look through his posts for the last 10 years and you'll see its non stop off topic crap about how Three is terrible and he makes up loads of random stuff.

It can be very annoying. And everyone who is a regular member on this forum will be more than willing to fill you in on how annoying he has been for the past 10 years by creating pointless arguments and insulting various members on this board. He's been banned at least over 5 times now because of his attitude on here.

Forgive me for getting a bit annoyed.

You accuse him of posting the same crap over and over, but that's exactly what you do. As above. We know. Leave it alone now, it's boring.

Excuse me for trying to be a valuable member of this forum by contributing towards various discussions with other members.

(Sorry, I'm in a bad mood. I'll be much happier in the morning!)

Ignore him, you are far more valued.

You are a valued member of the forum. I certainly value your contributions. It's only the one area that bugs me. I think you know what that is.

Anyway, I've made my point. Please do keep up the good work

nah, I'm just in a bad mood. Ignore my posts for now haha. They probably are worse than wavejocks at this point. If that's even possible

You hate Scotland too?

Scotland is a beautiful country.....

Some of the people are certainly characters

I'll have to wait and see what they say to me (I've got about 2 months left of minimum term), I've got a £5 discount on mine given by the Exec Office for "as long as you are a customer", so let's see what is said about that when/if they send the text.

TBH, I also won't have a huge issue with 4GB tethering either (I can also tether my EE handset I now have and I also now have wifi at 2 locations I used to need tethered data at in the past), so the current £15 plan with 200 minutes might actually suit. Perhaps I should email the person I was dealing with and ask...

£10 a month for AYCE handset data + 4GB tethered seems like a bargain in the current climate .

I will never be taken off the One Plan.

So how do intend stopping them?

Poo through their letterbox, duh.

Out of interest, I hear people have several options to move to, but is there a brand to the new plans. The One plan was a good brand I thought, it is good to give things names.

The LG U3477-A vs the LG ignite, these are both made up but my point is if something is given a brand or a name it is more memorable and appealing.

* maybe Samsung should have called their S4 the S4 ignite after watching last week's Watchdog!

I wish you the best of luck.

You miss the point, it is the 'air bandwidth' that is the issue, no amount of central caching on the network will help. I don't think you appreciate the specific way in which mobile technology delivers data to the end user, it isn't like a fixed line ISP and that's why these measures need to be taken.

Yes maybe they should have done it earlier, but the timing is due to a lot of factors, especially the big increase in streaming, the radio uptake of Netflix, the Apple sync technology, the very steep smartphone adoption curve etc. A lot has changed in a very short time-frame, plus the use of tethering for broadband replacement by a percentage of users has lead to this, that wasn't what the original intention of the mobile hotspot was, so this is a correction, leaving unlimited phone data in place.

If many reports from users are true, many are being allowed to stay on the One plan for now and the texts and calls might be initially targeted at the higher tethering users.

Yes 10% of the heaviest users use 60% of all data used on the Three network.

But that data usage isn't going to suddenly disappear. Sure people do tether heavily but people can also use loads of data without tethering. I know people, myself included who can use over 30GB without tethering.

Here is a real world statistic to back up my point. The average data use on the One Plan is 5.6GB for all users. On the new AYCE plans with 2GB/4GB tethering the average data use is 4.8GB per user. So yes the average data use has gone down but it hasn't decreased much. So that 60% isn't going to just drop down to 0%.

The top 10% will consume much less than they did before but not a significant drop.
Those in the top 10% on the One Plan currently consumer around 23GB a month whilst overall (including all tariffs) the average top 10% use over 13GB a month. This will drop, but not significantly.

Average data use on Three:

AYCE with unlimited tethering - 5.6GB
AYCE with 2GB/4GB tethering- 4.8GB
2GB Data cap - 1.2GB
500mb data cap- 0.2GB

If anything the average data use per month in 2015 will probably stabilise to what it is now which is around 20PB per month. Data use is still growing remember