Mobile Network Comparison

Rumours are spreading that catalogue store Argos is going to offer its own mobile phone contracts later this year. There have been unconfirmed reports over recent days that Argos will launch it’s own pay monthly deals from its hundreds of UK stores. Analysts are saying that we could see Argos Mobile on the high street as soon as April 2013.

There is no firm news about the plans yet though. Initial reports suggest that they will start by trialling mobile contracts and, if things work well, will consider starting their very own virtual network. There is still no information about which operator they would run their services on.

It is thought that Argos is particularly keen on the move as its mobile income results have been particularly poor recently. The success of budget virtual networks such as Giffgaff and Ovivo have severely cut into their margins. This is especially the case as Argos has traditionally made good income on commissions from PAYG deals with the main network operators.

However, their plan to go into the contract market is risky and may not be well advised given it orders of magnitude more competitive than the PAYG market they are already struggling in. Still, it is reported that they are hiring industry experts such as Vodafone manager Ben Murr to help get the new service off its feet.

As well as contract services, it is thought that Argos will offer SIM-only deals too. The Argos network could turn out to be a strong competitor of rivals such as Phones 4u.

The official word from Argos has yet to come though. A spokesperson refused to confirm any of the rumours and proposed commercial partners have either denied or refused to comment on the plans.

However, despite this, the industry is abuzz with talk about this development. It is thought that if Argos can make the most of its existing customer base the new venture could be very successful. In fact, analysts are suggesting that Argos Mobile could grow its user base to a mid-six figure size within about two years of launching. This would make it one of the larger virtual mobile networks if this was realised.

What’s your take on this? Do you think that Argos Mobile would materialise? Can it compete with other virtual networks on price? And would you use it on your phone?

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The Google Play store officially replaced the Android Market one year ago and to celebrate this birthday Google has decided to give all Android uses a gift in the form of some special offers and sales. The festivities will last for a whole week and you can get savings and money off on all sort of content. Items that are currently discounted include not only apps and games but also movies, music and magazines. And that’s not all. We also spotted some exclusive in-app content that’s only available now and cool bonuses such as exclusive in-game characters. You can even get discounts on accomodation.

Some great spots we’ve found include the pilot episode of the fantastic drama Breaking Bad absolutely free, Donnie Darko for just £4 in HD and 50% off games such as Monopoly and Plants vs Zombies.

But some of the content available is a little underwhelming. At the moment lots of the movies and music on offer are very old releases and there doesn’t seem to be very big savings available for new films at all. In fact, a lot of the “deals” aren’t discounted at all when compared to other online stores.

With a quick look around, we found DVDs available in supermarkets for the same price as Google’s deals. And some of the apps they claim to be giving away were always free.

Having said that, the celebrations have only just started and we don’t think Google would want to blow everything right away. Hopefully things will improve over the week and more and more great deals will be revealed. Keep and eye out on Google Play for the latest offers and surprises. After all, for Black Friday 2012 they had some pretty special deals. If you spot anything outstanding over the coming days, please come back and let us know in the comments.

Do you remember when Google Play was first launched a year ago? Do you use it regularly? And what’s your opinion of the current sale? Excited or let down? Let us know!

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Virtual network Virgin Mobile has come clean about its slow mobile internet speeds. A Virgin staff member called “Krystal_E” has posted an an official statement on the community forums confirming that they are heavily throttling the mobile data connection.

It is claimed that the speed cap is just a “trial” but it affects all customers whether they are on contract plans or PAYG and there is no ending date. Despite numerous denials about deliberately slowing down internet speeds, the throttling has and has been in place since February.

Virgin are arguing that they are throttling internet access to ensure they can “offer a good level of service to all customers”. But in their admission, they revealed that the current cap is set at 2 Mb/second down and just 0.5 Mb/second up. Now many users are complaining they can’t stream videos without constant buffering.

There is some argument for putting a speed cap on mobile data in order to guarantee service for all customers and prevent a small minority from hogging all the bandwidth. However, 2 Mb/second is far too slow and severely limits what you can do with your mobile.

And in any case, to play devil’s advocate, surely it’s the mobile company’s responsibility to ensure they have adequate infrastructure available to meet people’s needs? Why sell so many SIM cards if you can’t provide a decent service for all your customers? This is especially true for Virgin Mobile as they run on EE’s network and they should have plenty of spare 3G capacity.

Virgin Mobile is also being somewhat dishonest as they recently introduced “unlimited” data plans. However, by putting in a speed cap, they are necessarily introducing an artificial hard limit to the amount of data you can download. You wouldn’t have to be a massive cynic to think that maybe they underestimated how much people would take advantage of the unlimited tariffs and are introducing this change to try and limit people after all.

Virgin Mobile users are doubly annoyed as there have already been many changes this year making the mobile data provision worse. There were changes to the fair usage policy limiting monthly usage as well as a ban on tethering back in January. The latest news that they are throttling users’ data access to such a low limit is sure to annoy people.

Indeed, the Virgin Mobile community forums are now replete with outraged customers threatening to move to other networks that don’t cap their mobile data. Questions also have to be asked why it took so long for Virgin to own up to this change? Are they not in the habit of being transparent with their customers?

Some of the furious quotations from customers include “they deserve to be taken to the cleaners on this one”, “I’d personally report Virgin to the ASA” and “I signed up here specifically to state that I’ll be requesting my PAC at the end of this month”. Probably our absolute favourite is as follows:

Joined Virgin on 1GB package on the 16th Feb and left today for Tesco because of all this nonsense … Bye bye Virgin. It’s been a short and messy three weeks. Like a holiday romance with a pretty girl that turned out to be bipolar.

In response, Virgin has claimed that they will never reduce the cap any further. But that’s unlikely to placate their customers most of whom realise that Virgin Mobile hardly make any money on data as opposed to voice calls and suspect that the network is merely trying to reduce its outgoings at their expense.

And the problems don’t stop there. Virgin’s customers are also reporting that the cap is implemented poorly so you get sudden bursts of data followed by almost nothing. While it averages out to about 2 Mbit/s overall, it doesn’t make for useful internet access. We’ll be monitoring the situation closely to see if anything changes. In the meantime, you might want to think about changing to another network that offers a better unlimited data service.

Are you on Virgin Mobile? Did you notice the cap already? What do you think about this decision? And will you be staying with them or jumping ship?

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