The following is an edited version of a review by SimonC on the google group uk.telecom.mobile
"Just thought I'd share my experience so far of using giffgaff (
http://giffgaff.com), the new MVNO subsidiary of O2.
I got myself a giffgaff SIM shortly after their official launch at the end of November, but only actually transferred my number to the SIM a couple of weeks go (I was waiting to reach the final month of my iPhone O2 contract), however I am already very happy with things for a number of reasons...
First of all the tariff seemed to suit my usage perfectly (average 100 mins, 150 texts per month and about 200 MB of data) so the 8p calls, 4p texts and free data (free till end of may anyway) worked out to be cheaper than most of the other options I had seen - and so far that seems to have been born out (my initial £10 balance is currently at about £5, which is in line with the expected £10-14 I am anticipating to use each month). I have set myself up to use the auto top-up facility which should seamlessly top up £10 when my credit drops below £3. This can be tailored on their website (both the amount topped up and how many times a month it will do so).
giffgaff has purely web-based support to keep costs down, and I was perfectly happy with that as I don't often need to contact customer services anyway, and having to do so via their forum and e-ticket system seemed perfectly adequate to me - and in some ways preferable to waiting for ages listening to menu options and on-hold tunes. So far I have raised two tickets - one to initiate
the port in, and this was processed within 24 hours and the port in occurred as scheduled a couple of working days later. The second ticket was just to follow up on the port in as my mobile number didn't seem to have been updated on my online account management page (only an issue for when I needed to top up as the SIM itself was working fine with the new number). Again this was sorted within 24 hours.
I've raised a couple of other minor questions on the community forum (the idea is that non-account specific enquiries are raised there so that other users can try to solve them first - and only if they can't will it then get raised to giffgaff's own support team, again to save on costs). Again these have been dealt with very quickly and certainly in one case the answer had been in the support knowledge base anyway had I thought to search on it (I couldn't dial an 0800 number and hadn't realised that O2 requires you to drop the initial 0 on such calls).
The big surprise for me however has been the payback system. The idea of giffgaff is that it is "people powered", a large part of which is customers helping each other with issues on the forums, as I mentioned above, and also having existing customers helping with marketing by spreading the word. The incentive to participate in this is that you get rewarded with payback points for doing so. For example you get points for emailing people to tell them about giffgaff (50 points), referring people to sign up (200 points per person when they mention your username when they order a SIM), and for people activating SIMs that you send them on their behalf (500 points for you plus a bonus £5 for them when they activate the SIM with the first £10 topup), and then there are points for forum participation. It is the last of these that actually caught me by surprise. I had done a modest amount of helping out on
the forums during December (about 20 posts, 2 of which had been specifically marked as helpful by other users) and yet I was rewarded with almost 4000 points as I was deemed to be in the top tier for forum participation (they divided users into four tiers in order to dish out points - top contributors who got about 4000 points, average contributors got 1000, low contributors got 250 and non-contributors obviously got 0). Basically 100 points = £1, so effectively in December I netted myself over 4000 points, which when May comes round (the first of the two payback dates in the year - the other being November), I can convert to cold hard cash, add to my airtime credit, or donate to charity. At this rate I will be spending about £10-£15 a month on airtime credit, but earning around £40!
The points for forum participation I believe will be a bit variable - especially as they are keeping schtum on exactly how they are categorizing people in terms of the tiers (to avoid people "gaming" the system), and I believe the "pot" of points that will be awarded each month may not be fixed, but for people who enjoy chatting on forums and helping out with other people it seems that giffgaff is actually a pretty good network - perhaps even for users who would find their tariff on the face of it to be more expensive than alternatives (fortunately for me it seems actually to be one of the cheapest anyway). After the end of May they may well be charging for data (they currently haven't decided quite how to do so, which is part of the reason data is free at the moment), but even if it is something like a £5 flat rate per month for 1GB (which would seem to be in line with the competition), it will still work out excellent value for me when the payback is taken into account".
If there are any members here who could contribute their own review of this new MVNO, please make a post in reply below.
