How many issues are there really?

[blue_dot]

So just trying to make a proper evaluation of PM before I make the switch.

As I look at the forums, with them being one of the support channels, they are littered with problems.  In fact more than just general discussion.  So, of course, this puts worries into my mind as to how PM really is in regard to stability - as stability of my service is one of my key criteria.

So my question is: how many issues are there (say as a percentage of the user base)?  5%, 1%, .1%?

There will always be issues.  It's just the type of issue that I see cropping up that worry me.  But if these are only a tiny fraction of the userbase, then my worries are lessened.

An idea of this would help my decide where I'm taking my number in the next month.

[WearySky]

@kav2001c exactly - considering the vast vast vast majority of PM customers are never posting in here, it seems like the odds of your service just up and disappearing for no reason are slim to none.  It seems to be only when you make a change to your account (plan changes, payment info changes, the US addon fiasco) that things seem go awry.

[kav2001c]

Really the main issues I keep seeing are related to the self serve

Autopay doesn't renew, plans don't change, your info dissapears

For those who just pick a plan and forget about it I doubt ever even realize there are system issues

But anytime you change something it is an adventure

Usually ends well but that odd time *yikes*

[blue_dot]

And I'm aware of all the limitations.  I know that 99.9% of my calling is in province.  I know that there is no International roaming.  And I know all my resolutions for all of those limits.

In essence, my worry is service.   What is the percentage chance that my 12 year old will not be able to reach me due to a service issue?  And how long to resolve that issue when it happens.  I have one phone - my cell - and it is used a lot for voice.

[blue_dot]

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@mimmo wrote:

 add  some of the payment suggetsions if you relly want to be extra prudent (  making one time payments euqal to your plan, renewing plan day before expirery) and you should be golden. 

In this day and age, those things should not be needed (assuming no plan change). As Public Mobile is prepaid service, it should simply be: take a payment, apply service to an account.   Prepaid is not a new service, these backends should be very mature and very stable.

[mimmo]

your other consideration is determing how much you might save by switching from your current provider.  my next cycle will be about $20/month vs $40 once rewards are added.  that alone to me is worth the possible service interuption...  that being said, no service is bulletproof.  and yes 90 day plan autopay and not making changes is the way to be 99% sure of avoiding service interuptions,  add  some of the payment suggetsions if you relly want to be extra prudent (  making one time payments euqal to your plan, renewing plan day before expirery) and you should be golden. 

Other thing to not is there is no roaming outside of canada and USA.  I am currently in Europe (typically i get a local sim card, but  didnt this time) and have found not having a service even to recieve sms has caused occasional issues, logging into gmail from a new computer and it wants to send a verification code.  trying to get public wifi, but they want a tel number to send sms to..)  

[blue_dot]

Thanks all for the feedback.

Over the last 20 years, I've been on Telus, Rogers, Bell.  The only issues I've had have been overloaded network (trying to call from a bar on New Years Eve), roaming to the wrong network or non-existant coverage at the our cottage (which I don't expect to change).

My concern is when I see loss of service that is directly related to the carrier - issues at renewal, loss of service mid plan, phones getting blacklisted and so forth.

If autopay is on, a plan doesn't change, the phone is the same, service should be bulletproof.  And currently I'm not 100% convinced that it is 100% bulletproof.

[benchen5]

@blue_240sx  I believe the amount of issues is unique to each customer; some expierence more than others and some not at all. Myself, I have been lucky to only experience one issue since I started with PM (last June). My issue was a plan change did not occur properly resulting in a billing error but a PM Mod promptly corrected that issue for me. The service is basically Telus so no problems there.

[will13am]

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@dohadotahmed wrote:

I had issue with my fido 3 gb LTE data/15$ month promotion during october 2016. The problem was to solve from their back office. They escalate the issue and it takes more than a month to resolve. Several phone calls for hours.
Public Mobile is lot more better than solving prblem through the knowledgeable community members.
Some problems have to fix from the back end and where the amazing moderators are always there to help you. I am sure if you switch pm you will never regret many happy customers like us. Welcome to public mobile.

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Thanks for bringing this up.  I referred to it as the placebo effect in a different thread.  While initial contact was a simple phone call away, problem resolution was not necessarily instantaneous.  If measured by time to resolution instead of time of initial contact, Public Mobile's customer service level is actually a lot better.

[dohadotahmed]

I had issue with my fido 3 gb LTE data/15$ month promotion during october 2016. The problem was to solve from their back office. They escalate the issue and it takes more than a month to resolve. Several phone calls for hours.
Public Mobile is lot more better than solving prblem through the knowledgeable community members.
Some problems have to fix from the back end and where the amazing moderators are always there to help you. I am sure if you switch pm you will never regret many happy customers like us. Welcome to public mobile.

[Watoko]

Agree with @dearmusic and @RLBL and @WearySky -- what you see here is confirmation bias, as this is a support forum.

Just make sure you do your due diligence to ensure the information you supply during the porting process is correct, and you'll be fine as this human error seemed to be the single major issue during the activation process.

And if anything goes wrong, you actually are at a very good time where there will be prompt support by an official Public Mobile moderator (and awesome community members like you see here), unlike during the promo period a couple months back.

[stonechucker]

@blue_dot, you're doing it the right way by asking questions, and reading the forums.

I would also suggest looking at the knowledge base to find the best made plans for joining Public Mobile.

For example, many wish to immediately port their number in to the service, but that's not the suggested practice.  Activations will commonly fail on combined port in attempts.

The forums suggest activating a new number, to confirm all services are working correctly, and only then submitting a number change for the number port in.

Honestly, the more you can read about activating and understanding the plans, the better off you'll be, and the less hassles you'll come across.

I hope you join our community!

[gunter]

As said in above posts, if you have no issue, you would not be posting in the forums. So there's not really any way of measuring how many "issues" there are. During the introduction of the US roaming plan, there were some glitches which occurred, and yes glitches do happen regardless of the size of the company. Even BlackBerry during its prime days has had outages, as well as Apple with iMessage. Regarding phone providers, I've had to call Fido/Rogers/Bell/Telus numerous times, and for Rogers it was a monthly thing. Not only that but when you purchase something, it tends to have 1 year manufacturer warranty. It's because things do happen, and in the phone industry it's no different. Sometimes porting numbers over doesn't work well ( there is actually a way you should follow for PM )

but that shouldn't deter you from using PM. 

[WearySky]

As mentioned - the vast majority of people posting in here only come here when they have problems.  During normal times (like now), almost all issues get sorted within a couple hours of being posted on the forums (if posted during times when mods are actually online).  And there's some percentage of issues that are able to be solved by the very helpful (as long as you're civil) fellow customers, as opposed to requiring mod intervention, which you don't see with other providers either.  Over the last month or so since the backlog was cleared up from all the November promo madness, I'd say there's something like 15-30 new threads posted to the forums daily, and out of those I'd say anywhere from 50 to 75% of those are actual problems, as opposed to people asking questions about how things work.  So say anywhere from 5-20 actual issues per day, out of hundreds of thousands of customers.  I'd say that's a pretty reasonable rate, myself.

[RLBL]

@blue_dot,

Although that would be interesting to know, I doubt this information is available (and if it is, I doubt it would be made available). As well, there is no dissmissing the problems that were user error (some could have been totally avoided with proper documentation, and some where 100% user error).

It seems clear to me that there are things that are known by operators when setting and porting accounts from provider to provider which are gotchas unknown to the average user who are taking responsilibility for themselves.

I personally know 6 people (including myself) who registered during the fall promo, and only 2 had minor gotchas (and they both were caused by using a browser with known issues, behind secure firewalls). The activations and porting went through fine, but it did not look like it did at 1st but it was fine.

One also has to consider that most of the time, most people do not come to forums to say that their activation, porting and service was fine.  The posts (in any forum) are typically full of the people who had problems (and although this looks terrible and sounds, they are in the minority of users as compared to the whole: if that was not the case, the company would not be in business)

[dearmusic]

99% Post on this forum are issues.

Because if you have no issue, most likely you won't be making a post here.

This forum is very biased because almost all post here are issues.

Considering there are more than 200 thousand subscribers (statistics from 2012) and there are like... less than 10 unresolved issues in the forum...

Less than 0.005% of users are experiencing problems.

And really, all the recent issues are repeating themself...

Most common one being number porting failure which caused no service in days, which if they actually asked a mod to look at it, they could have fixed it in hours.

Second most common one was US roaming closes account early, which was fixed by following the exact step to purchase add-ons.

Bottom line is, if you are worried because all you see are troubles on this forum, chances are, all you see will be troubles on the forum 99% of the time.

[will13am]

@blue_dot, we have no real way of determining that statistic.  I don't think Public Mobile would know themselves exact numbers.  If they did, certainly it would not be shared with the user base.

That said, I believe the issues from the fall promotion was much more benign than thing seem.  I say this because Public Mobile is a lean organization that is staff to handle a typical day to day work load like today where things are rather quiet.  They had somewhere between 50,000-100,000 new accounts during the promotion.  The level of activity could have easily been 100 to 1000 times normal.  Then, there was also huge anxiety from new customers not so used to the lack of a toll free number.  Sometimes a problem ends up being reported and ranted about many times over.  So, the 100 to 1000 times is further magnified.  In the face of such overwhelming conditions, it makes the situation look a lot worse than it really is.

I signed up a number of accounts myself and assisted many others with signing up during the promotion.  Of the roughly 20 new accounts to which I have knowledge of, there were only 3 issues.  I had one issue involving an unexplained rejection of a credit card.  Problem was solved by using an alternate credit card.  A friend had an issue with porting from Rogers.  That was due to data entry error, resulting in the need to seek moderator intervention.  The third incident involved a failed port from Bell that was due to Bell blocking the port.  That too required moderator intervention.  Numerically, my data point says 15% problem incident rate due to all causes.  Qualitatively, there were really no major problems because the credit card problem was fixed by the user and the two failed ports allowed the old service to continue to be used as normal.

As pointed out by @CaNuCk07, rest assured the service is very good.  Just look past all the dust stirred up by the promotion last year.

[ech_786]

I had the same question in my mind when switching to PM, all I can tell I am very happy.. I live in very remote area and service is good there.  Mods are good with responding emails and community is awsome.  

I have to admit that community people are also very knowledge able and they help.

I wouldn't worry about the switch ...

I mean we can not predict tomorrow what's going to happen but as at the moment so far so good.

Consider this with the cool mind and welcome to PM in advanced 🙂

Cheers!

[CaNuCk07]

The issues outstanding now should not be a deterrant for making the switch.  The service and reception are great.

When there are any issues, the moderators are awesome at correcting the issue quickly now.

Lastly those who do have issues, are a small part of hte user base, and i would hazard to guess that a vast majority of hte problems users face are due to their incorrect input of information into the system