Application for £8 sim rejected twice despite excellent credit

[Sibelius70]

I ordered an £8/month sim and was rejected twice. I couldn’t understand and  worried that something was wrong with credit files. I checked and  found these scores:

experian 999/999

equifax 943/1000

transunion 665/710

I have a long credit history and have not once been late with a payment. I also have an excellent salary and no debt, except for a small remaining mortgage. This doesn’t make any sense. 

Can anyone explain why this might have happened?

[madasaf1sh]

@Sibelius70 

Have a look at an MVNO called Spusu, it runs on EE, and there customer service is excellent, took me 5 minutes the other day to get a replacement esim, and the guy on the end of the phone was excellent. 
Also have a look at Honest Mobile, who run on Three and they have the same customer services ethos, and as these are small companies, they value customers a lot more...

[Sibelius70]

Thanks for the tip madasah1sh. I’ve just written Spusu to ask some questions about roaming. Depending on what they answer, maybe I can try them as well. 

[Oxonian]

@Sibelius70 

If the O2 network works for you, you might wish to consider either Tesco Mobile or Sky Mobile, both of whom operate on the O2 infrastructure. They both have good Customer Service ratings.

I have had recent personal experience of dealing with Tesco Mobile on behalf of an elderly relative - they were excellent.   

[Sibelius70]

Thanks. The main reason for wanting o2 was to have good roaming and doubling of broadband and mobile data because I’m also with virgin. Unfortunately I wouldn’t get those with Tesco and Sky.   I’ve ordered a few sims — lebara, Voxi, 1pmobile and will try them out. I think Lebara might be a good fit, but we’ll see. 

[Oxonian]

@Sibelius70 

Good luck and it would be interesting to know what you settle upon.  

[Sibelius70]

I've now tested EE (through Lyca and 1pmobile) and Vodafone (Lebara) in Oxford. It's been interesting. Vodafone's network seems to work really well and consistently in different locations around town. In the city centre I get 190Mbps/35Mbps and at home in East Oxford indoors 20Mbps/8Mbps. EE is extremely slow in East Oxford (Unusable in places. Even got put on Edge 'E' a few times, something I haven't seen in years) and has ok download speeds (40-70Mbps) but very slow upload (2Mbps) in my office in the city centre.  Despite saying I should get strong 4G indoors at home, in most of my house I had no signal. Only the third floor was ok.  O2 Pay as You Go sim was pretty fast at home (71Mbps/12Mbps), but not consistently good around town. 

So I've decided to go with Lebara on a 30-day  plan. £10 for 20GB 5G, unlimited calls/texts, Free EU roaming up to my my UK  data max, 100 international minutes, Visual voicemail, wifi calling and, from what I can tell, reasonable customer service. And, unlike O2, everything has run smoothly with these other companies. Hopefully, I'll never need customer service, which I was assuming with O2.

Quite honestly, I don't know why people give their money to O2 these days. Isn't 1.2 stars on Trustpilot sufficient warning? I feel content with giving Lebara a go. And glad not to be tied to a long contract. 

[Enlli]

Thanks for coming back with those observations.

Just shows, as we tell people, coverage maps aren't everything 

[Sibelius70]

Yes, exactly. I realise this time around, that the only way to know if a service is going to work is to try it properly where you spend most time and where it's important for you to have good coverage. I haven't quite done that, but because I'm not committing to a long contract, it matters less. I can always switch if it doesn't work out. But, absolutely, the coverage maps are not reflective of what individual people will experience. They seem to only be a very general theoretical indication of coverage. 

[madasaf1sh]

Thanks for coming back @Sibelius70 

Where I am Three is the worst, and made me move one of our sims from Honest Mobile to EE then to Spusu.. but as you said testing makes all the difference and for a few quid saves hundreds of pounds later on.

Lebara are a good choice, still on o2, cheap to run, and not heard anything wrong with their CS.. 

Good Luck with them. 

[Sibelius70]

Lebara is actually on Vodafone now, which doesn’t seem bad in our area. I’ll be moving around more over Christmas and will see then if coverage is good.