Joining giffgaff

I heard about giffgaff from a coworker after I was once again cursing the lack of signal in the office with my previous network provider. I recently (last week) migrated over to these guys. Here's a brief summary of what it is all about.

• Pay As You Go - contract free and free sim! No lock in means I'm not tied down to them if I'm happy and so my options remain open.
• Monthly Goody Bags - for a fixed fee there are packages you can add when you know your usage is going to be high.
• Genuinely unlimited Internet usage - though after further reading they don't allow tethering (which is fair enough - there will be people that will constantly stream content otherwise). Googling a little more and searching their community forums it seems there is an unofficial 20GB limit. I really don't feel this is particularly restrictive cap given my usage since I've had a smartphone.
• Free calls and text to fellow giffgaff users - this is quite common but useful to know.
• Runs on O2 network - I've used O2 for 14 years and their coverage is capable enough in my experience.
• Community support - plenty of forums supported by existing customers
• Cash back scheme - spread the word and earn cash for using. I wouldn't personally go out and push a product unless I believed and used the product myself.

It sounded perfect and other people that were already on giffgaff were happy with their experience. So I decided to move over to them. It really wasn't very difficult either.

Mon

• Requested free SIM to be delivered with email confirming it had been sent

Tue

• No sign of it, but I suspect Mr Postie being overwhelmed with Christmas post.
• Requested PAC from Vodafone.

Wed

• Entered code on their website to active the SIM and created an account. Unfortunately it was after 10pm and would be active in the morning according to documentation. If I had done it before 10pm it would have been done in 30mins. I don't know why they can't activate throughout the night but I'm not too bothered.
• PAC texted to my phone. Ready to leave!

Thu

• SIM is active with PAYG credit I added via their website. Also setup auto topup.
• I enter PAC to begin transfer. Later in the day I got a message (via there website dashboard) from one of their agents confirming that it would be transferred tomorrow.

Fri

• Midday number has transferred. Woo hoo!
• No Internet access - a quick search gave me information for Android Settings.
• Added £10 GoodyBag to get me going.

That's it! Looking back I reckon you can realistically change over to giffgaff in 2 days if you didn't have to wait for the SIM to turn up. For those people interested give me a yell in person as I have a few SIMs to hand out people in interested in trying it out. It comes with a free £5 credit. And I get something out of it too! Or you could click this link to request a SIM to be sent to you directly.

So far the biggest noticeable change is that I have better connectivity (the issues I had with my previous provider you can find here) and have much more control about how much I spend or not spend on a monthly basis. The process of configuring my handset could be automated or eased by a simple settings request form as part of the dashboard. The experience overall is positive. We will see..

Send me a free SIM