As you could read in my post about using a 3G key on my Openwrt router, the performance of TIM absolutely bad whereas Vodafone would give me descent speeds, even in 3G. So I switched to Vodafone.
This year my experience was a bit different.
First I had to deal with a Vodafone sales point in Lecco, that tricked me into buying a new SIM-card in order to activate my 10GB 4G deal. I lost 15 € in the process, 10 € for the new SIM plus I couldn't reuse the 5€ pre-existing credit on my old SIM. When trying to speak to the helpdesk, the operators were quite knowledgeable about procedures but the procedures are a rip-off. You can move credit from one SIM to another, but it costs 5€. If you deactivate a SIM, you can claim the residual credit and transfert it to another SIM. This can only be done in a Vodafone sales point, so I kept this for some other time.
In the meantime I had my Galaxy S5 act as a Wifi hotspot and it worked like a charm. Except 1 little detail : the 3 mobile phones, 1 tablet and 2 laptops were consuming close to 1GB a day. I had to find a solution to extend my 10GB allowance for data. I could activate a voice SIM with a contract and double my volume or I could buy another 10GB at Vodafone.
After my bad experience in the sales point I decided to have a look at other mobile operators. I was underwhelmed by the mobile coverage of Tre and Wind in my region, so I was stuck with either TIM or Vodafone.
I decided to give it a go with TIM and went to one of their resellers in Lecco. Oh boy, was this a mistake !
Here's what I planned to do : buy a Mifi (Huawei 4G LTE) and get 20GB of LTE data traffic for 1 month for free. I needed a Mifi anyway in order to free up my S5 and the prices where very competitive (79,90€ for the Huawei, SIM included, 1 € credit after activation, 20 GB of free data volume for 1 month).
First 1 had to battle the shop, because they were pissed because I was better informed than they were. They tried to trick me into buying an additional data plan, on top of my free 1 month promo.
The following week, was a week of misery :
- after 48h there still was no data plan active and the 119 was still sending me back to the shop ;
- the shop would send me back to the 119 ;
- I finally gave on the 119 and began to tweet on the Customerservice of TIM (day 4) ;
- Customer service on Twitter seems to behave like a robot service redirecting dialogs to private tweets. But I would never get replies on my private tweets, so I had to send a couple of angry public tweets with hashtags pointing to terms like 'fake', 'rip-off' before I eventually got a real human answer on day 5 (they opened a ticket at the technical customer service).
- On day 7 I received a phone call from an operator confirming the activation of Data plan, the reimbursement of 4€ incorrectly charged when I inserted the sim-card in my Huawey on day 5.
In the meantime, I survived by putting my Vodafone SIM into my Huawey (and changing the APN accordingly).
How could I survive that long without a proper dataplan ? Well, luckily Vodafone didn't get their act together and when my data volume exceeded my allowed 10GB, my Huawey remained happily connected to the tower station. And it remained until the end of day 7, consuming 17GB on a 10GB dataplan. And it only stopped because the kids disconnected the Huawey from the charger and the device ran out of juice.
In the meantime, I'm on TIM again and I was actually surprised by the good 4G coverage in the area. Being in a pre-alpine region, it's not obvious to get a good 4G LTE coverage. Any way, I wasn't expecting any descent coverage, but to my big surprise the signal is quite strong.
