Adams Rants

I remember back in May when I was choosing a new phone provider, one of the companies that my friends were urging me to stay away from was the relative newcomer to the Irish market - Three. All over the net there were horror stories about poor customer support that only got worse after they outsourced their call centre to India. Apparently they didn’t want to even know about you after you bought your phone, let alone help you with any problems that you may be having and on the odd occasion where you did by chance get through to an agent who was willing to help, you found that you couldn’t understand them or be understood! Nevertheless, I opted to plunge for them, hoping that a) nothing would go wrong and b) if it did, their customer care could solve it! 3 months down the road, something did go wrong but I’m happy to say that my experience with 3 Support is a positive one…

I was impressed with almost every aspect of Three’s services. While their call tariffs were expensive, their texts were cheap and cheerful and I was saving a massive amount of money compared to my previous operator, O2. I was particularly fond of their “walled-garden” which offered tonnes of 3G services free of charge and I made certain to buy their data package addon which allowed me to access any website for as little as €5.99 per month! However, I did always feel that the term they dubbed their service - “Mobile Broadband” - was a little too generous as oftentimes pages would load up at a snails pace as their remote proxy struggled to process requests and oftentimes died just as you had managed to page you wanted!

I wasn’t really that bothered about it, because I didn’t really use it that much but it was when I was suddenly asked to reverify my age that I started to get a bit frustrated. Three require that all customers who wish to have access to “almost every website” must first go into a Three store with a passport so that their account can be verified. That’s fair enough but I verified my age in May and now it was asking me to do it again! It was around this time that I spotted this vast thread on Boards.ie which seemed to indicate that Three were now taking people off of their web proxy by request!

I sent Three customer care an email and within an hour I was contacted by a Three representative who apologised for the Age Verification issue and said that Tech support were provisioning measures that would mean that I wouldn’t have to verify my age again and also they were going to update my account so that I would no longer be using their proxy! The only downside to it was that I would have to wait up to 48 hours for these changes to take place but I suppose it was going to be worth it!

The next day I decided to check and see if I was off the godforsaken proxy and when I went to visit a site, it loaded instantly! I also went to download the GMail web app which was, like all other third party apps, blocked by Three. It worked! I then tried the Opera Mini mobile web browser and it worked flawlessly! Opera Mini really will change the way I can browse. It introduces a tonne of interesting and efficient features to help enhance my web browsing experience and I can see myself using it for a while to come!

So congratulations to Three for coming up trumps when the day that I had been dreading finally came and I had to contact you! Three have been taking a lot of slack lately regarding their mobile broadband service and their efforts to help people with issues but I can safely say that this was a reassuring experience for me and my approval rating for Three has never been as high!