I walked into the 3Store at Bluewater today and asked the kindly sales chap if he could explain whether or not X-Series afforded me to send data to and from a java applet on my handset inclusive in the deal.
He couldn’t answer.
He didn’t know. He knew what my question meant. He understood the issue. He didn’t know the answer though.
‘It, er, says Unlimited Internet Access,’ he says, pointing to the sign (which I photographed for posterity).
‘Right,’ I say, ‘Because internet access is different from internet data,’ I offer.
‘Yeah….’ he says.
‘So, I’m paying for my data usage, right?’ I ask him.
He didn’t know. I didn’t continue to skewer him.
I had a look on the My Three section to see how my usage was tallying. Last month there was a data tally saying, ‘you’ve used x of 10mb’. This month there’s nothing.
Is that good?
I dunno.
I really don’t.
It could be good. It should be good. It should mean that with X-Series, they’re not counting data. It should hopefully mean that you know, as long as you don’t hose their network, they won’t bother billing you for data. Any data. Whatever you like.
I won’t know, though, until my bill next month.
Nowhere have I seen a statement from anyone of Three UK saying it’s ‘unlimited data’.
It’s always ‘unlimited internet access’ or ‘unlimited web pages’ or something similar.
Is this a concern? Yes. Clasically, yes, it’s a real problem, because it’ll mean a shocker of a bill for me next month.
But, as we’ve recently seen, Frank Sixt and his colleagues are seriously trying their best to do the ‘Suits 2.0’ thing.
The truth is in the bill. So, adieu on this issue until Jan 2007.
Here we go again. Not just this blog Ewan but several of the others that you wrote over the past few days are showing this repeated pattern in our industry. A swaith of mobile businesses trying to get into something [the mobile internet] that another sector [non-mobile ISP’s] has been happily ticking along in for donkeys years [in terms of the model ‘that works’]. The existing businesses have sorted out all the mistakes but these new boys are learning from scratch…and we are suffering as a result.
non-mobile ISP’s have been doing the whole “monthly bill, all you can eat” for years. They have realised that you can’t have a policy that says “oooh, that was FTP data, we’re gonna have to charge for that…and what’s that? email via a non-approved client, oh gosh, that’ll be non-standard data that will. oh and come on, running a windows or java application that accesses data on the internet, well really, you didn’t expect that to be part of your ‘unlimited web access’ package did you? and anyway when we said unlimited web page access we meant during your prescribed off-peak hours”.
But then along comes a bunch of people who can hardly get telephony right and they thing that the asterix’ed ‘fair usage policy’ and a PR staffer pretending to be the finance director with a “hey we’re really nice guys, come round for tea and dive into the drinks trolley” blog can hide everything.
The only thing more ridiculous at the moment is Microsoft truly appearing to believe that they have just “invented” the mobile phone…creating the biggest load of junk I have ever seen on a phone and not realising that nokia et al have been doing it for years (and landline companies for decades) and so bugs such as not showing an international call as being from outside the UK really does make them look like a bunch of primary school kids building their first space rocket out of egg cartons and loo rolls.
How much longer do the public have to be the ones that suffer from this tardiness? Being in the middle of such a technological revolution as our generation is, you’d think it would be exciting and fun; and on the one hand it most definitely is. But on the other hand I just feel we are at the mercy of a bunch of school kids doing an A level in business studies and who are working their way through the standard teaching text ‘my first business’…and that are still only on chapter 4…..only 6 more chapters to go!! Did nobody tell them that you don’t launch the business to real money-paying public until the end of the book, not after the first chapter!! And that you don’t change your business model on a whim simply because the other kids in classs 3B did.
steve
Hi Ewan,
We have posted a response to your question on our blog.
It’s bit on the legalese side, but will clarify the above.
http://xseries.three.com/blog/
Cheers
de