Mobile Network Comparison

Glastonbury, the world’s largest greenfield festival, will be the first to offer dedicated on-site 4G wireless data. With a capacity of about 200,000 people and a location miles away from the nearest major city, mobile internet access often slows to a crawl at Glasto. Usually there are only about 9,000 people in the village and not that many of them have 4G phones!

As a result, many large festivals like Glasto and other public events often bring extra cell towers to cope with the demand, but this year Michael Eavis is trying something different.

In a bit of a media, gimmick, EE is sponsoring a specially-modified vehicle that will drive around the festival site offering wifi access through a EE 4G connection. You won’t need to be an EE customer, just to have a wifi-enabled mobile device to take advantage of the free service. The 4G router will drive around the massive festival site beaming out its high-speed internet access.

There won’t be any issues with the wifi access point getting stuck in the infamous Glastonbury mud as it will be fitted onto a special pimped-out New Holland farm tractor capable of the worst that even Glasto has to offer. And festival-goers will be able to keep up to date with its location by following the EE Twitter feed.

Don’t think that thousands of stinky hippies will be chasing after the tractor though desperate to update their Facebook status – there will also be the usual “recharge” tents at the festival offering free power and internet access over the weekend.

This year the nine hundred acre Worthy Farm in the South West of England will play host to hundreds of international artists from all over the world and the gates open to those lucky enough to have grabbed a ticket today.

As ever, all eyes will be on the weather forecast over the coming days. Music-wise, the main headliners on the Pyramid stage will be The Rolling Stones, Mumford & Sons and (sigh) Arctic Monkeys.

However, smarter punters know better and will be cramming in one of the smaller areas to see better-respected acts such as Fuck Buttons, Eat Static and Gold Panda or up-and-coming bands including Jagwa-Ma and Suuns. And of course, the festival site becomes a huge city of art, performance, activism and fun with plenty else to see and do.

To help you keep track of everything you want to see, EE have also sponsored the offical Glastonbury 2013 smartphone app available for Android and iPhone. It even caters for those who are staying at home over the weekend as it has live streams of the BBC coverage of the festival’s main stages.

Are you going to Glasto this year? And if so, are you bringing a smartphone or are you deciding not to risk it and preferring to leaving it at home? Will you download the app and do you think anyone will bother to seek out the 4G tractor? Let us know!

Did you already see our reviews of the top 5 toughest iPhone cases money can buy? There were some pretty impressive cases available which could stand up to a rather more severe battering that you’d expect from normal usage.

But we later showed a video of something taking extreme to the next level. One of the cases we decided not to include in our round-up was able to withstand being shot at. Yes, you did read that right. There’s an iPhone case that will survive being hit by a bullet fired by a 0.50 cal gun!

But this leads us to the obvious next question: what would happen without the protective case? Can an iPhone survive being shot with no case at all? To find out, carry on and watch the video below:

Since last Thursday, Giffgaff have been paying out millions of pounds back to their members. It’s a process of sharing and mutual returns that they have been doing since they first launched only a few years ago. This time the total paid out was almost £2 million!

Presumably taking a bit of inspiration from employee-owed businesses such as Waitrose and John Lewis, Giffgaff aims to be “the network run by you”. While this is not true in any real legal sense, Giffgaff have always gone to significant efforts to solicit feedback from their users and the Ideas forum is replete with suggestions that will eventually come to light as implemented features.

What’s more, Giffgaff actively seek the involvement of the community in other aspects of running a mobile network. They save money by relying on users as the front-line customer support. And the forums are filled with useful members willing to help out with minor issues such a APN settings or activating a SIM card.

Giffgaff also have relied strongly on word of mouth to promote their services. Much of their new customer base comes from member-to-member referrals and it’s been a very successful model due to the potential for exponential growth. At least in the early days, they didn’t have a big advertising spend and saved a huge amount of marketing money by asking their users to sell for them.

In return for their work on the forums and in promotional activities, Giffgaff rewards helpful users with payback – money that they can choose to receive either as airtime credit, cold hard cash or as a charitable donation. Keeping in theme, Giffgaff allow its members to choose the charities each payback period and match all the contributions with their own donation.

Payback is processed every six months in June and December and, as Giffgaff has grown as a network, the amount of people helping out has grown massively as has the amount of money paid back to the community. We’ve been carefully charting Giffgaff’s paybacksince the first payments went out back in June 2010.

Back then, the total paid out was only £27,000 and it went up steadily until June the next year when they paid out £250,000 (including £6,000 to just one member called uzzyy!) After that, things really took off as Giffgaff rapidly expanded and the payback payouts exploded too quickly reaching over £1 million in June last year. The graph got even steeper as the exponential increases continued until the last payback payment in December 2012 where members received a total of £1,850,000.

That level of growth has not turned out to be sustainable and it was with a bit of a whimper that Giffgaff announced their latest figures this June. However, the total is still going up just not as fast as before.

We do suspect that there’s a bit of disappointment at Giffgaff HQ that they didn’t hit the £2 million mark this time round. And their blog post certainly was careful not to mention that the trend is slowing down.

However, it was never going to be able to maintain that level of growth and we’d certainly say that the amount paid out is nothing less than impressive! If anything it robustly puts into perspective the amount of money that major networks must be wasting on customer service and marketing which makes it clearly why they charge so much more for calls, texts and data than Giffgaff.

We put together the graph at the top of the page to chart the history of Giffgaff’s payback payments so far. What do you think will happen to the trend in the future?

If you’d like to earn a cut of £2 million, you should get involved and sign up to a Giffgaff account. You get £5 free credit to start you off and you will be able to start earning as soon as your activate your SIM card. You don’t even need to use it – just having an active SIM qualifies you to get payback payments!

What do you think about the payback scheme? Are you involved or are you thinking about joining. Will this support and marketing model continue to be successful? And most importantly, can you tell us your prediction for the total paid out next time in December?