Three's X-Series: A week on

Link: xseries: Fair users will be happy

I have done a massive volte-face on Three, recently. I’ve had quite a few emails in the past from people berating me for berating Three now and again. For example, I can recall effing and blinding about how they were pupporting to be a ‘mobile media company’ at the same time as charging users 3 quid a meg for data. Not good enough.

I was apprehensive about the X-Series. Based on how this mobile industry has been working over the past years I pretty much reckoned the Three management would screw it all up by releasing some half-baked nonsense ‘X-Series’ rubbish for £45 plus the cost of your price plan. You know, something like that. Plus, ‘X-Series’ in terms of name had a rather… well… 60-year-old-thinking-it’s-cool-but-it’s-not ring about it.

The fact that X-Series was everything I was *secretly* hoping for — and thensome — left me near enough Cloud 9. There’s an annoying niggle, and that’s the fact ShoZu still doesn’t appear to work, but that’s it. Everything else pretty much rocks.

Talking to industry journalists the other day, I was having a great time saying, ‘No, really, … no seriously, yes, 5,000 Skype minutes a month. Yup. Free.’

Someone yesterday was saying to me, ‘Ahh all my family abroad use Skype, but, you know, that Three Skype deal is only for calls in the UK, right?’

‘Rubbish! Rubbish!’ I responded, ‘It’s ‘free’ to any Skype user.’

6,000 MMS messages? Geez.

Mobile podcasts?

Orb n’ Slingbox if that’s your thing?

MSN messenger and Yahoo Go?

3MusicStore?

AND one of the best moblie portals on the planet?

And 1gb of data while you’re at it.

Well. Phenomenal. Add to that the rather generous price plan allowances together with consistently providing top of the range handsets and Three is, in my books, the best mobile operator in the country.

I’m also really encouraged by their assertations that fair use really does mean ‘fair use’. Check out this fair use description posted by their Group Finance Director, Frank Sixt, on their blog today:

One of my colleagues suggested the best way to describe [our fair use policy] is by using an analogy of visiting a friend’s house for dinner. They say to you: “Would you like a drink?” and they point to the drinks cabinet and say, “Help yourself, have whatever drinks you want.”

They mean it – have whatever drinks you want, and as many as you want.

However, if they see you starting to put all their bottles in cardboard boxes and loading them into the boot of your car – well, would they think this was covered by their ‘Help yourself policy’?

I think not. This is all the X-Series Fair Use policy means.

Right on. It’s astonishing to actually witness mobile industry executives communicating so frankly and so directly. Muchos kudos.

Frank continues:

As another example, we truly believe that a fair user will be hard pressed to use more than 5,000 Skype minutes a month. But imagine they did. Imagine an instance where they had a sick relative in Australia and went way beyond that limit? I would make personally sure that the fair use definition was not invoked to limit their use.

If on the other hand, someone was using Skype on X-Series to run a long distance call centre, well, I’d be equally determined to make sure they were shut down.

That’s it. Simple as that. So if you think “Fair Use” is being used unfairly in your case, as always, you know where to find me!

That last few words, you-know-where-to-find-me, is a link to the X-Series blog email address.

Well I’m gonna give it a go. I”m going to email the blog and ask about ShoZu.

Meantime, Three rocks.