Screenshot by @topgold on Lumia.
I LOST THE LAST TRACE of O2-Ireland on my phones late in the morning of 7 March 2015 and it feels like a friend has left the stage. I got a lot of technical help and customer support from O2-Ireland ever since they took the Esat Digifone customer base over more than eight years ago.
The new partnership with Three Ireland has already boosted my data speeds on my handsets to 4G in the rural parts of County Tipperary where I'm based. That's nice to see. But having a post-paid account is more about after-sales service to me.
I have monthly contracts with both O2 and Three. There's a world of difference in terms of how the two networks contact customers. I hope the old O2 way isn't subordinated to Three's spammy method of contacting customers.
I get text messages from Three that I cannot return. I get voice mail messages from Three that I cannot ring back. I haven't figured out a way to use Twitter to contact Three's customer service. When I do, I hope to discover Three has an efficient method of threading direct messages across customer service shifts like O2-Ireland did with Radian 6 software.
I know it's early days but I am troubled by an apparent decrease in upload data speeds with the new Three service standard. I upload in chunks (40-70 MB audio files) using Lumia or Microsoft Surface web browser interfaces. Those files now take longer to upload via the Surface and they often time out due to an unknown error with Internet Explorer 11 on Lumia. I hope this kind of snag disappears before St Patrick's Day when I plan to upload 100 MB files several times during the festivities.
I'm able to jump networks on account of the status of my mobile telephone contracts--something I rarely do--if customer contact with Three proves to be a level below the kind of customer care O2 has given me since 2006.
[Bernie Goldbach pays more than 100 euro every month for mobile voice and data services.]
