I switched to vodafone from 3 because they were the only company to offer the handset I wanted. When I got my new phone they said it would take a few hours for my number to transfer from my old sim to the new sim, however within about half an hour I noticed the 3 mobile sim was no longer active. So naturally I was rather excited. I booted up my new phone with vodafone sim included and waited for my number to activate... and I waited. After a couple of hours I thought it was getting a tad ridiculous but I couldn't go back to the store because they had closed for the day so I called the good old help line. After holding for what seemed like an eternity (close to 45 minutes) someone finally told me that it was likely a manufacturing fault and told me to take my phone in to the vodafone store the next day to verify. I did this and someone with the same handset as me traded sim cards and you guessed it, the phone was working fine but my sim wasn't. So what they did was give me a new sim and transferred my number accross, saying it would be 2-3 hours before it transferred again. I waited about 6 hours before I contacted the vodafone "customer service" again and explained my story and he said he'd have to consult some other people and get back to me. They got back to me the next day and asked me if I'd tested the phone etc (as I had already explained to them I had done) and when I reiterated my frustration he said he'd have to consult some other technical staff who could not be contacted til the next day, but he assured me I would be contacted.

To this guy's credit he did get back to me and he explained that there was a problem with my account... it had not been activated by vodafone staff. He assured me that it would be up and running by that evening and took it upon himself to get this done. It was not, so I called them back and was just given generic instructions to reset my handset and try again, etc. Still no luck. The next day when I woke up I finally had service, an entire 4 days with no service and this came for me at a time when I had recently moved to a new city without a job. I could not organise my job interviews or anything and I explained this to the vodafone staff and eventually I was given the royal bounty of the first months fee waived from my contract. Hardly a just reward. Anyway, the story doesn't entirely end there, but I won't go into as much detail.

Although I could now make and receive calls I did not have my full service activated. I was still unable to send or receive mms and had no internet connection. I called "customer service" again and held for close to 40 minutes before being walked through setting my phone up and then being told my service would be activated a short while after hanging up. Anyway, long story was it hadn't. So I called again and whoever I had spoken to hadn't activated whatever they needed to on their end, but this issue was fixed this time.

In addition to all this about 50% of the time I make calls from home I get a bad line where either I can not hear what is being said or the person I'm talking to can't hear what I'm saying. Sometime when I send sms messages it fails many times before it finally sends and on odd occasions it sends multiple messages, I've had upwards of 10 duplicate messages sent.

The funny thing after all this I received my first bill and it was for the full amount. I had to contact them again and remind them they owed me a month but I didn't bother to call them this time, I just emailed them.

One thing is for certain, the next time I buy a phone I'll make sure it's from a different provider.