A week with GiffGaff

I had been a loyal T-Mobile customer for nearly 19 years. Obviously when I first signed-up it was called Mercury One2One, then just One2One and eventually T-Mobile. During those 19 years i only went through 3 tariffs. The reason being that those tariffs were cheap and every time I would upgrade they were trying to make me change to something more pricey. This time, though, I decided to get a PAC and move over to giffgaff.

giffgaff is a VMNO (Virtual Mobile Network Operator), which means that they use somebody else’s network. In this case it’s O2. They are a community rather than a company. The users are not customers but members. If you want, you can go on the forum and help other members with problems they might be having.

But I am sure you want to know if they are any good or not. Right? Well, they are. I am happy with it. Apart form the fact that you can have rooted phones, phones purchased abroad and anything else you can imagime with support from a fairly big community, you are not tied to a contract. You buy credit and then you can use that credit to buy a “goodybag” (a monthly package) that gives you a number of minutes, a number of texts and an amount of data. The cost of the goodybags ranges from £5 to £18 and you can have from 60mins + 20MB data, to 2000mins + unlimited data. You can buy any goodybag you like when ever you like and if you go away on holiday you don;t need to buy a goodybag and wait till you come back from your trip.

All in all, it’s just great. As for handsets, you can buy them through a finance firm or you can buy one outright from a number of shops.

Oh! Did I mention that by referring friends to giffgaff you and your friends earn £5 credit each that you can use to buy goodybags or pay for extra services?