Worst customer service I have ever known. They even make it difficult to top up.
Three Mobile Broadband Reviews
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I have one of these Huawei mifi devices with Three. I live in a big town centre and always get full strength reception, have also tried using the device around London, Leicester and Birmingham. What I find is that the download speeds are decent when I first connect but for most of the time they are absolutely abysmal, certainly not fast enough for streaming video, and often a simple page like google search will take minutes to load. It should not be called a broadband service, more equivalent to patchy dial-up. This has been the case ever since I got the device six months ago. The rates for bandwidth are also astronomical and the fact a top-up expires after 30 days is a total scam. Three customer support is dire. I'm going to ebay my device in the coming weeks and I feel really sorry for whoever buys it from me.
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3.what can I say thay don't care after you singed there contract . customer service what customer service put on hold 4 ages time and time again nothing gets done about my complaints about paying 4 a service thay just don't give I feel like iv been scammed my advice save your time and money look else were.
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Report abuseBeen using 3 dongles of various types for 4 years as our location is rural and too far away from an exchange. We do have a land line connection but this is intermittent and runs 300/400 mbps at best so the dongle was our only way of getting better results. My first dongles would get me a connection if I used a long lead and placed it in the window, not ideal but they worked. When 3 made the E585 MiFi available that solved my problems, being a WiFi router in itself I could now position it in the highest window of the house which gave me a 5 bar signal and could then connect up to 5 devices to it (2 laptops and my smartphone currently connect to it) with a 15Gb monthly allowance. Download speeds can be as high as 4.5 Mbps and Uploads 2.5 Mbps during daytime, it slows down during the evening (as I type it's 3.38 Mbps & 1.74 Mbps) Can't speak about Customer Services as never had to contact them. On the technical and results front I'm very happy.
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Report abuse@David What kind of router where you using ? why not just use a high end smartphone like the iPhone 5 Galaxy S3 4G Model Or Galaxy Note 2 4G Model you would still get high speed and thether it wireless with as many devices as you wont ?
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What grinds me is when you pay for a service and then you are barred from using it because of your local setup; For instance dongle + 3 SIM worked fine it laptop, place into router and internet services like web and mail is blocked, L2TP from laptop through router and all works, so this means Three as trying to block the use of routers why? This is a pay per mega-byte SIM, how I choose to use the bytes is my own concern not Three's.
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This company has the worst customer service of any mobile operator I have used.
Complaints logged on line are not acknowledged or followed up.
Billing queries are met with demands for payment and threats of collection agencies and credit black listing. -
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I have had a 3 MiFi dongle for about 5 months now. I have to say the average speed I get from it is about 17mbps and can go has high as 21mbps. My home broadband speed never goes above 1.5mbps and costs me more. I rate 3 never had any issues at all. We also have 3 smartphones one of which is on the one plan, when teathered speeds are almost as good as MiFi. I have to say I am totally happy with 3.
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The service is useless. I have been a Three Mobile customer for 3 years now and that's because I get a full signal in my area and you can by a 12gb sim without a contract. But now the service has deteriorated to a point where I can't load text emails, google search page will not load etc....Absolute rubbish.
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I advice anyone one is looking to get 3 broadband to stay well well WELL away from it!
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Bought 3's PAYG deal for my Ipad mini - £20.45 for 90 days / 3 GB. Coverage for West Yorkshire v good. Speed is fast. Only use it when roving - so don't use up all the allowance (about a third used) - wish you could buy less - but hey ho.
Problem is trying to get top up - only way to get this deal seems to be to buy another nano sim from the shop - which is irritating. Otherwise its £10 a month. But it seems the best deal for me - so will buy a card as a back up to put in when I run out. -
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Got fed up with land line service and net speed 1.5mb/s at best and waited weeks for line faults to be fixed ( TTalk) Tried a 3 h+ 353 dongle onpayg for a month, net speed was on average 4 - 6mb/s and reliable. Bought mifi dongle and this worked well but started to get CONNECTED but no internet. The help line blamed the distance from the mast and from there coverage map i was borderline for indoor reception. I had spent a month checking every part of the house and testing speeds also a net trawl on providers and mast sharing. I now realise these guys can control the network with a few key strokes. You must not get a contract without doing a full check onpayg for the service reception and performance.I did not accept the helpline response (asked to speak to a manager) and was offered a termination of contract or a small monthly reduction i wanted to stay with this provider as the broadband speed on average was much faster than the land line. A year on I still get the odd connection problems but now I do a reset on the mifi and this more often works or call the help line and now seem to get a helpful person. Having in a moment of frustration told TT to get lost we are very happy with out the old copper wire connection I can tether the mobile with similar speeds on T M. or use vode on the G Note , three connection options.
We are in a rural area and a long way from a BT exchange. -
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Horrendous, absolutely horrendous, beyond belief not value for money. The service is slow and unreliable, a three minute video takes thirty minutes to stream and I randomly lose connection. If I leave town for the weekend they throttle my connection so when I come back I need to repeatadely reconnect or phone the awful call centre to get full bandwidth.
The signal in my current area is listed as best possible yet it's slower than 1995 dial up.
Now onto the customer service, I've had occasion to phone them at least twenty times yet have dared to do so only four individual times (this does not mean four phonecalls, wait and see). If you're lucky enough to get through to them without being hung-up on, or getting someone who claims to speak English then you're in for fun.
On my last occassion I was unable to connect to the wireless dongle, despite connecting to other networks in range. I spent 20 minutes with the condescending indian women telling me to plug the dongle into my laptop without using the wire, and me saying wtf? (it has a min usb power point) before she rephrased and said connect to the dongle via wifi (the entire point of the then 30 minute call being that I couldnt do this).
Globalism and all, I live in the f**king country after which the language is named. If we cant understand each other you are doing something wrong.
3 mobile... Utter s**te... stay away -
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Likewise and amen to the dozens of stinking reviews here. 3's service varies from barely acceptable to totally unusable and slower than dialup. Their call centres in India are probably the worst I've ever had the misfortune to use, with barely literate imbeciles replying robotically... Sometimes apparently to a problem they gave on their script instead of the actual problem you've described to them. And if you have the audacity to actually try using the service you pay for, you get throttled or kicked off the network entirely.
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Have had a 3 dongle for about a year. I live in an area with poor reception, but 3 worked. not great, but it worked. at least i had internet. slow, but again, at least i had internet access... upstairs only. but, after a year, i started noticing that i was running out of data very quickly - quicker and quicker, and i wasnt using the internet more. sometimes even barely used it.
when i questioned them, they denied everything and told me i needed to troubleshoot my system. dont believe this.
last time i topped up, i bought 3 gigabyte, normally that would last me 3 weeks. this time, 3 days. un effing believable.
crooks. so angry.
now i have to find another provider, probably just gonna end up the same deal.
are any company's in england legit??? starting to think not :( -
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I have never had a problem with Three mobile broadband. I moved across to them when I realised just how much I was tethering my Nokia E65 (on Vodafone) and eventually the hard wired connection was starting to get a bit mediocre.
Having been through a Huawei dongle and now their portable hotspot I can't fault them and even use it for some of my online gaming! -
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you people are stupid to purchase these lame dongles they suck it dont matter witch netwprk providers dongles you use orange 3 vodaphone tmobile o2 they SUCK They am slow and a pure waste of money
i been with 3 8+ years now and last night i was running some speed test on my smartphone im getting around 17+Meg download speed in hand i use my smartphone to tether to my mac book i can stream HD Videos with ease its awesome i advise you people dump your cheap ass dongles and get a powerful smartphone like the new Galaxy S3, Note 2 or iPhone 5 make sure your smartphone is LTE AKA 4G Compatible then connect to computer then you watch how fast your internet surfing speeds am
remember if you am using cheap dongles connected to cheap computers aka budgets computers and your computers are no updated virus free then your can NOT BLAME 3 for your idiotic slow speeds -
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The three customer service is a nightmare! The customer sales team of three is the worst I ever spoke to. I was put through to a customer sales team through customer services team to know about the latest offers. The customer sales team was very pushy and were very forceful in making me commit to buy their products. They were not interested at all in understanding my requirements.
I had once complained about the network signal issue and I received a call back from the technical team who took many different details for 30mins and later I received calls thrice and every time they called I had to give the same information. It was a waste if time complaining about their services and on top of it speaking to three was annoying! -
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Like another reviewer here, I can see the mast from my living room window and my flat is on the first floor with no tall buildings around to block the signal. My dongle is positioned only 10 feet from said living room window with a clear line of sight to the mast. I live only 12 miles from the centre of London and was assured that I was in a high coverage/strong signal area. Yet my service is so slow that if I had a telephone line (lack of being the reason I have to use mobile broadband) I would probably get faster speeds using old fashioned dial-up. My husband gets faster service on his phone. I have NEVER had more than 3 of the five bars on the signal strength indicator and the speed is no different whether connected to 3G, HSPA or once, inexplicably, Orange??? YouTube and similar sites are a no go area, I get cut off several times per browsing session and have to take the dongle out and re-insert before it will reconnect and the software for the dongle (supplied by 3) regularly corrupts itself and I can't connect until I've uninstalled and then re-installed it. Emails inexplicably fail to send at odd random times even when I AM connected and am RECEIVING emails normally. I regularly get messages from 3 saying that service may be a little slow for a week or two while they are improving the mast but my service is so slow anyway that I don't even notice and there's no improvement when the work is finished. I work shifts and regularly use the internet at all hours morning, noon, evening and in the small hours so it's not all due to 'high traffic' either. Ridiculous! My two year contract is now up and I will be looking elsewhere.
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Three UK's service is appalling.
Every time I phone their service centre, the very polite and helpful staff ask me to run through the same routine: restart my computer, reconnect the dongle, etc. But they are of no help. They cannot do anything themselves to correct the problem.
The problem is a technical, engineering problem: they simply will not provide a decent data transmission service, and the constant excuse is that they are upgrading the (local) transmitter, that they have a problem with congestion, that they are oversubscribed. Why then do they not install transmitters that are capable of a far greater data capacity than what they anticipate? Put it this way: would Bugatti build a Veyron fitted with an engine governor that restricted it to 30mph? I think not. So why do Three (apparently) make it their policy to throttle their connection service.
Remember the early internet, when it took up to 30 minutes to load a single page of text? Well, with Three, those days are here again!
I wonder, would a legal challenge, a class action against Three, make them reconsider what kind of service they are prepared to deliver? -
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I was domestic customer with THREE for X3 years ,2009,2010,2011, and my only criticism was that I expected Connection Speeds comparable to a standard ADSL phoneline connection.
Turns out, that after being one year with PLUSNET, that they were "AS GOOD AS " my basic PLUSNET phone connection ! I only live a 300 yards from the BT Exchange so my speed is as good as it gets for my phoneline. WELL DONE THREE ! -
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3 mobile broadband is atrocious. random cut outs despite apparent high coverage, dongle crashes system. Utterly crap. Waste of time and effort. avoid
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3 ROCK! Period im getting around 5+Meg download speeds in hand i dont know what you people are doing make sure your system is clean of virus and you havent got to many apps and process running in one go 3 ROCK PERIOD!!
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Three mobile does not work in the area where we live. In November 2012 I returned the dongle. The company accepted it could not provide a service. We have since had intimidating 'phone calls day after day, despite informing them that we're elderly and in poor health. This is a very unpleasant company.
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This is a useless service. The connection keeps cutting out. I have had the dongle replaced once and the same thing is happening again. It is also very difficult to contact anyone at 3 who will do anything helpful.
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Avoid at all costs. Customer service is v v poor. Speeds impossibly slow - Less than 0.25mbps. Total Rip OFF!!!
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I was with Vodadafone but had no signal for 10 months they wouldn't let me off until I had wrote endless Emails and letters to them, I changed to 3 connect as everyone said it was the best in my area and Im very happy to say its brilliant and invested in their wi fi type, its the first time ive had a full signal and never loses either, the only thing I have against it is you have to plug it in like a phone, sometimes I have my phoned connected at the same time.
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I cancelled my monthly mobile broadband account in a 3 store in Brighton and it was confirmed in a call to Customer Services, but they continued to take money from the account, when the Direct Debit was cancelled by me they told me the account had not been cancelled and sent a bill in the post. I phoned Customer Services and was put through to the section dealing with mobile broad band but as soon as I mentioned my issues with terminating the account I was told that I needed to be transferred to another department and as I half expected that department did not respond within 5 minutes so I terminated the call. I suspect that having a department dealing with complaints that does not answer calls is company policy, along with the other underhand methods they have used to date to try to prevent me from terminating my account with them. In addition, they had ample information from me via e mail in order to terminate my account and as the cancelling of the Direct Debit with my bank provided further weight to my intention to terminate, but they refused to do so. Their service such as it was had not been used since 25th September 2012.
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AWFUL customer service. Add on at least £15 worth of call costs when you come to cancel. Shame because the internet isnt bad.
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I'm on a monthly contract with 3 USB internet key.
I phoned to cancel the contract today but the guy was too defensive. He put me on hold for 5 minutes when I told him that I wanted to go forward with the cancellation (on the hope that I would hang the phone) and afterwards he wanted to make me wait 48 hours so I could speak with my friends and maybe change my mind!
I had to scream over the phone as the guy just would not cancel the contract.
Awful customer service!!
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