They explain that the worry is running up a big bill. They are suggesting that you can use your same plan without having to spend extra money, what would be thousands of pounds without 'like home'

All fair points, but like home is also free or no charge over the normal price plan.

"This has saved those customers £1.3 billion since launch."

Is it just me or would that 1.3 Billion extra have gone a long way to making the UK Three network a real competitor to EE? Therefore better prices for all.
Swings and roundabouts I guess..... swings and roundabouts.....

Actually, they should call it "Feels like O2"

It's not that slow!

Obviously not. You're ignoring that most people aren't willing to pay extortionate amounts for roaming internationally.

While I'm sure Three IS losing money because of "Feel at Home", it's not losing £1.3 billion

Not only not willing, but in most 'domestic user' cases, don't need to.

Reading this thread it's as if there's no such thing as Wifi ! There so much of it around
these days, that quite honestly it's more than adequate just to rely on that for non obsessive use of data while on holiday (and in many cases business too)

Hmm. Some dodgy congested 2.4GHz Wi-Fi hotspot that's time or speed limited, or your own phone?

I bet most people in the UK would sooner use a decent 4G connection than try and connect to the Wi-Fi, log in and try not to move too much so the connection to the access point falls to 11Mbps or something pathetic, with huge latency and even potential security issues. Oh, and having to enter email addresses and hope not to get spammed later.

Obviously not all Wi-Fi is like that, but a lot of the time it is. Especially in hotels, on trains, airports and coffee shops. Fair enough, there are newer setups that work pretty well (especially on 5GHz) but I'd say it's still the minority and I can't say how reliable I'd expect Wi-Fi to be in some of the places I go to abroad.

In fact, I rarely use Wi-Fi at all these days because bar Virgin Media on the Underground and a few other examples, I can never get the same service as on my phone.

Now when roaming, if I'm supposed to just use Wi-Fi then maybe the network should be a bit more up front and honest. Tell me to sod off if I want to stream video or download a few albums at Extreme quality on Spotify, or those films I rented on Google Play ahead of the 14 hour flight and wanted to download in HD because my phone has a 6-inch QHD screen...

I'd fully support Three saying what it doesn't want me to do - rather than pretend it's all fine and then I discover that it isn't.

in my case google maps or apple maps never loads anything.. so the one thing that I will need when travelling doesn't work.

I fully understand blocking audio/video streaming, but everything else should be left unthrottled.

I don't think you appreciate what, (and all) the average punter uses data on their phone for

For most users it's a case of uploading and downloading trivia to Facebook, Whatsapp and Twitter, and that's it. As for music and video content, then most (quite sensibly) will download that at home before they leave. You don't even need live data for Google and other navigation aps to work, again get organised and download in advance on your home WiFi.

The best course of action to drive down the cost, and drive up the speed of roaming data, is to refuse to use it

Three's Feel at Home is aimed at the market I outline above, it's 'free', but you clearly get what you pay for.

Of course people on holiday probably just want to update their status. That's how Three advertises it.

Anyone else is stuffed. There is no service on offer for anyone who wants to download a film before a flight, and didn't think to fill their device with it all before they left home, or save all the map data for Google Maps (which does time out, and also doesn't have everything you need for detailed searching).

I bet Joe Public probably don't even know how to save offline maps on Google Maps given how hidden the feature is.

What clearly happens is that people try something, it doesn't work or is slow, and they just accept it. Three tells them it's down to the local network, so they go home saying that the Internet was ropey, but not Three's fault and it's just because coverage is **** in that country. Everyone is happy...

...well obviously not everyone, going by the sheer number of complaints on social media to Three about problems. What's more, while I am not going to leave Three, many people have said just that - and are going to Vodafone to take advantage of the Euro/World Traveller service. Maybe more limited data, as it's down to how much you have, but totally unrestricted.

All I want is Three to be honest. And now it HAS admitted it's restricting things so the majority of people will be happy, while also telling me that we can all use a VPN if we want. It seems bizarre, because the people who know the VPN 'solution' are likely to be the ones who might go off and seriously abuse the network - not just downloading one or two films.

That's revenue to them then if it's what people saved, not necessarily profit and it is money people wouldn't have spent because everyone knows that prior to the recent things like feel at home and other deals using mobile data abroad was something you just didn't really do, or heavily moderated usage. The nice thing about just including it is people can just leave data turned on and still get email, post pictures etc. However as they say speeds may be slower.

The cost to Three when they pay partner networks is obviously much higher, hence the restrictions. I see Jon's point about them being more up front, but at the same time we need to recognise that Like Home specifically is a no extra charge thing and is a really good offer as well, and also to think about the fact that for the average user, it probably serves it's purpose.



The thing is, only people on these forums or similar know that a VPN works, probably less than 0.1% of the users, of all the users probably less than 1% have EVER configured a VPN on a mobile phone and probably 50% don't even know what a VPN even is. We are very much a micro-community that demand much different things to most typical users, sometimes we expect a bit too much in my opinion.

It is subject to a 25GB FUP, I'm sure if people do use a VPN and abuse the offer then Three may in future start clamping down more heavily and suspend access at 25GB or lower that limit. We saw the end of unlimited tethering when a tiny number of mega-pisstakers really went to town with it and used it at main home internet for solid downloading / whole household into the hundreds of gigs / terabyte when the main concept behind it was to prevent bill shock and 'unlimited' to the point where use it for normal usage as much as you want.

They called it unlimited personal hotspot because it was intended for bringing up a hotspot when out and about and you want to use your laptop outdoors etc, they didn't call it unlimited home broadband replacement. And so that one came to an end..

But that's my point. Only a tiny number of people would know the VPN trick, but those people will also be the most likely to abuse things. It would make more sense to block VPNs, and if they're already sending all the data through their own pipe, then couldn't they suspend your data if it detects a VPN, or something 'unknown'?

I don't go on holiday to abuse anything, but not everyone is sitting by a beach on a holiday. When I travel to see family abroad, I have days sitting around bored and wanting to watch something on Netflix. Or download a game, or stream Spotify.

I'm surprised I need to justify my actions, but guess it's great for Three as if you single out people as being (in their words) exceptional users, then you can make it so people like me appear to be abusers, and are making it worse for everyone else.

If that were true, then why is Vodafone letting me use 20GB a month (albeit for £3 a day) with full 4G access?

In any case, Three has said it's now 12GB not 25GB. Maybe they'll continue to lower the limit, although then it will be even harder to call it unlimited? Not that I think that's a bad thing. Knock it down to the same as offered for tethering, say 4 or 8GB a month.. and for the £5 a day tariff, say 1GB per day.

It's clear that Wi-Fi or a VPN solves the problem, but Three wants to give the impression it offers everything for free and simply won't say to anyone to use Wi-Fi. It wants everyone to think they're giving away over a billion pounds in benefits to look like heroes, and it all falls apart if we all get to see what they're actually offering!

No, we don't, you might, but I dislike the dishonesty they are are showing, if they want to offer it as a bargain basement "no extra charge thing" then they should say it's a bare minimum service and if you do want a service like at home it will cost extra, and then offer a proper service like you have at home as well, at an extra cost.

Jon you're not abusing it, but at the same time the website said the performance may not be as good. You have raised some good points, if it doesn't stream even basic low quality streams then that's something that Three should look into.

My main point is that most users are probably satisfied that for free they can use their phone to post holiday pictures and also that they don't have to worry about a big roaming bill or making sure mobile data is disabled and doesn't accidentally get turned on. We've all see the "sad face" stories of the £4000 bills in the Daily Mail.

You are right, maybe they need to make it clearer that the service won't stream high quality streams etc and they need to make sure that basic browsing and maybe low quality / audio streams work.

I can't stream anything at all. File downloads crawl at an unbelievably slow speed.

The T&Cs saying may not be as fast/good is misleading. It's restricted. Yes, it might just be speed capped so badly that all video will fail to stream (but isn't implicitly blocked) but that's semantics. Maybe Three will now go away and see if they can tweak anything so that you might be able to stream a video at, say, 360p. That would be better than nothing. Netflix is usually pretty resilient at low speeds, so that just shows HOW slow it is on Three.

There is one poster who has said video streaming worked in the USA, but that has to be a first and I wonder if they used a VPN (after all, this thread had plenty of people asking and for a short time the VPN that is known to work very well was posted for all)?

The days of the huge bills should be over, as by default you'll always be capped once you reach a certain amount. The risk is that you can turn off the warning and not get it again, even weeks or months later (unless that's changed, but I don't think it has). From summer 2017 the EU problem should go away too, but surely then people will all expect that their service will be identical in France as it is here, and that they'll also get to use 4G, VoLTE and so on.

Would anyone be kind enough to DM me the 'magic' VPN?

I'm off to Spain next week... interested to see how restricted Three's Feel At Home is.... if it's as bad as most say, it looks like a VPN may come in handy.

Currently on EE's EU data bolt on.. £3/day for 100mb full speed, 400mb restricted after that. I used this a few weeks ago and the 400mb restricted data was nearly unusable.

Seems so far that only Vodafone doesn't do anything nasty. O2 also appears to have a limit of 100MB before slowing things down.

I assume if you buy an actual bundle of data (at great cost) then it's full speed though. Certainly that was my experience on EE in the past.

I really wish they'd just call it free roaming. Then I wouldn't expect anything.

Does having VPN switched onto another country trigger roaming data charges though?

a couple of times I've used Knowroaming to download a movie before a flight.. paying just £5 daily unlimited data bolt on.

But after paying 5 quid you get unlimited data and speed on any local network.
If I did the same with the Euro bolt on from Three, I wouldn't be able to do it, having paid the same.

And Knowroaming is a Canadian company, so in essence they are out of the data roaming cap laws that UK carriers need to adhere to.

The WHOLE point is not that "performance may not be as good".
The point is that IT IS BLOCKED SO IT WILL NEVER BE AS GOOD under any circumstances. (unless you are lucky enough like the other poster who was travelling in the US - in my experience the US is as blocked as Europe if not worse .. so many times I´ve been unable to check an address in google maps !!!)

As I Tweeted earlier today, they could call it 'Feels like that second home in the country where the power sometimes cuts out without warning and the water tastes funny'. Or something.

I'll raise your description and allow Three to use my description free of charge if they wish on any future (more truthful) advertising:

"Feels like Home, when home is in a country that only has a basic 9.6kbps 2G GSM network".



Edit
Off to find Jon's tweet

When I was in France in August I found that i couldn't update apps from the Apple app store on Three Feel at Home as they just wouldn't download.

However, when I was mobile in a car they downloaded no problem.

No idea how that would make a difference but it did.

As I mentioned earlier, I'm in Madrid this weekend. The experience is a bit different to when I was in Florida. I've been able to browse, use social media and Google Maps without a problem. In fact, I'm pretty much relying on Google Maps and Citymapper! I was also able to stream some music from Apple Music, but it was a bit slow to get going. I downloaded an app but it did that pretty slowly. Video, however, is another story. In YouTube, the search works quickly but the video just doesn't load. In Netflix, it doesn't even get past the splash screen.

Be very, very grateful if someone could PM me the VPN so that I can see the difference (as long as the data is still free on Feel at Home, of course!).

It's clearly being restricted because on a speed test I got 9Mb/s down, which should be plenty fast enough for streaming. Browsing feels very quick.