Or as some might say: “motherfucking 3 is a motherfucking pain”. Thats Three as in Ireland’s newest mobile network, the crowd with the ads of weird people on buses, and cherries that sing to Japanese kids (theres always someone in the cinema who laughs). Yesterday I signed up with them, don’t ask me why. I was seduced by a fancy new phone (a Nokia 6280) and the promise of football highlights immediately after every game.
The phone is great – I set up my serene Gougane Barra wallpaper and copied over my home-made Lee Perry and Flaming Lips ringtones via USB – I had been told this would be a problem in Linux, but no such thing… just a copy & paste to /media/usbdisk. Set up my contacts, installed Zelda, and I was nearly done.
The network, on the other hand, is not so good. The main reason I got the phone with the 3G broadband coverage was to tinker with the technology… get some RSS feeds and DAFT alerts, check my email, log onto my server, access my Freevo to set up some recordings, etc. Its only now I’m finding out that this is not possible thanks to 3′s infamous “walled garden”. Three limits your internet access only to sites that they choose. You buy access to what they call “the internet” – at the moment I’m using their Daily Free Trial (up to 1 hour / 2MB usage) – but it is extremely restricted. Its good enough for your average user, he can sneakily check Wikipedia during his pub quiz, but it doesn’t suit me.
There is a system for suggesting new sites, I don’t know how effective it is, but they charge you for the privilege. Might not be expensive, but thats beside the point.
We are constantly looking to improve our range of websites. if you would like to suggest one, text the address to 36663 and we’ll look into it. Each text is charged at the standard rate.
Whats worse is that they charge you for reporting an error on their part:
If you arrived at this page from a link one on of our listed websites, please let us know by texting us the website name you were visiting on the above number.
I thought about whether or not I could get around these restrictions. Even among the approved websites, access is solely through port 80, which rules out POP/IMAP, FTP, SSH and other services. I thought about forwarding my mails to my 3mail account, but there is an issue there with a maximum number of mails allowed by 3mail. So maybe I could set up some filters to ensure that only the important mails were forwarded. Alternatively, I could avail of ‘Gmail Lite’, which I was happy to see on the list of approved websites. No such luck though – “the services of gmailwireless.com have been discontinued”.
The free football highlights are great, but the comedy, music and all that stuff I can do without because there’s no way I’m going to pay €2 each for a 3 minute clip that I wouldn’t even watch on YouTube. I’ll have to think about what to do now, apparently this phone can only be unlocked by 3, and I don’t want to know what they’ll charge for that, but o2 is looking very tempting again.
4 Comments
I used 3 in Italy when they launched the first 3G network in Europe. While there were no restrictions on what I could do online (the phone made a handy modem if my cable died) it was nigh on impossible to make phone calls even from the centre of Milan!
I was seduced by the same Nokia 6280. Wait till you try to deal with their customer service. or lack of service. It’s horrible. Drove me crazy. Now I also find that people can’t ring me, don’t even get voicemail. Motherfucking 3 is a motherfucking pain
I had thought about moving to Three following annoyances with O2.
O2 disconnected me (without telling me) because of a direct debit payment not going through when I switched banks. I paid the bill by cheque – O2 said it takes 10 days for a cheque to clear!
Then they bill me for that amount again, because it’s automated billing. Have you had the phone call from them offering you great new tarriffs, but not telling you you are signing up for another contract with them! A number of people I knwo have had that happen. My contract is up in November, and was looking at 3. Internet access is painful on a mobile, unless it has a large screen. I had looked at the Nokia mentioned as well, and at the SonyEricsson Cybershot one- I’ll be looking very carefully after reading this.
Warning all!I switched to three and I am happy with the minutes and texts but to change or port my number from vodafone took TWELVE days,I faxed,I posted,I called into a 3g store,I e-mailed and I rang every other day before it happened!!!
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