[Huawei P20 Pro Questions & Answers] croques:
Still angry - draft to CEO of Three

David Richard Dyson

Chief Executive

Hutchison 3G UK Holdings Limited

Star House,

20 Grenfell Road,

Maidenhead,

Berkshire,

SL6 1EH

Dear Dave,

I wouldn’t normally have the temerity to address a Chief Executive by his given name; I see you post it around the Three website though, so I trust it will be acceptable to you; accept my apologies if not, Dave.

I write about my experience with Three over the past 9 months and recently. Forgive my long-windedness, my style and any poor erudition you may discern. I wish to appraise you of all circumstances fully. I would imagine any CEO with his/her finger on the pulse of their business would gladly accept raw customer feedback.

I will start, out of sequence, with recent happenings. This is going to be very raw – I’m very still angry. My prose may betray me.

On Tuesday of this week I ordered an Huawei P20 Pro phone from Car Phone Warehouse. I bought it SIM free and paid nigh on £800 for its bright-shiny newness. It was a wondrous thing to behold and I began to like it immediately. I placed my Three, monthly contract, SIM in and switched on. During set-up I was a little concerned to find an application open; one of yours which required me to accept something or other. I did not wish anything of Three on my phone but could find no way of going forward in the set-up process. So I shut the phone down and restarted. I don’t suppose you can imagine my consternation, my growing anger, my rage even, when I saw a Three logo on the second splash screen of boot-up.

When I was able to look closely at MY phone if was littered with your, (well, Three’s; I’m using ‘your’ and ‘you’ for the Three body corporate; I’ll leave you to interpret), dross…. My phone was littered with your dross. My browser had been redirected to always start on Three! There was a Wuntu app and I guess a Candy-Crush wannabe also littering my phone for which I had no need. You’ll no doubt say customers like this. No Dave, we don’t!

I do have to ask the questions. Why? When did I give Three permission to do this? Why can’t I remove all it? Apps and the home screen setting went easily enough. The splash screen was written in to place with system wide permissions and only apps signed with an Huawei key can do this, as you know. So that means you conspired with Huawei to do this to me! You had meetings about it; you thought it would be a - ‘good idea’. For whom? Who in their right mind would ever imagine, even in the wildest depths of stupor that phone users would like to have a crass, badly drawn figure 3, looking as if it has dragon scales, to adorn their phone. All displayed on the brightest eye-screwingly bright-whiteness. I really cannot fathom the stupidity; the arrogance, the paternalism you must exhibit to allow you to make these assumptions for me, Simply crass, Dave, on your part in 2018. And be in no doubt, ‘you’ and ‘your’ here refers to the personal you.

To be be clear, Dave, I bought a phone from an independent retailer, I purposely avoided Three stores and, excuse me, I don’t normally revert to the vernacular but it seems the only way to express my rage, I find your **** all over my phone! How can this be? By what right do you do this?

Imagine for moment you have changed broadband supplier at home. (I mean ‘you’ the person here. I’m sure you get it.) The new router arrives and you connect up, you enter the password and start web-surfing. A moment or two later a van pulls up outside and workmen start to repaint the front door of your house in the colours of the broadband provider’s logo. But more, the workmen enter your house, unasked, and reset your computer to always start at the broadband providers home page in the style of the now defunct AOL and Compuserve. But, still more, the workmen then proceeded to place scatter cushions with cartoon prints around the sitting room.

I imagine you would be outraged at the defiling of your home in this way.

I am outraged that Three has defiled my phone. I am so outraged that the phone was returned to CPW for a refund yesterday.

What can you take away from this, Dave? Well, I note you are one of those policy-on-paper guys. It’s so easy isn’t it. You have an 11 o’clock with a few other execs – they’re only a bit younger than me I see and likely over-the-hill too. You all throw something together that you think will impress the punters; you put it out there and go to lunch. But you’ve forgotten it all since haven’t you, Dave?

What is your policy now? What is it that your mission statement says?

Let me show you part of it:-

Our commitment to #makeitright is reflected through the way we do business.

We’re dedicated to running our business responsibly.

From respecting human rights and upholding ethical standards to using innovation to make things better for our people, customers and communities.

We recognise the positive impact that we can have when we make the most of our skills and resources to address some of the most pressing social and environmental issues. Especially when we engage our people, customers and supply partners to achieve more together.

How does any of that fit what you have done to my phone, bought entirely independently and now defiled.? A factory reset and a non Three SIM inserted did not remove your splash logo on start-up and shutdown. So straight our away the phone has it’s second-hand sale value reduced significantly. Your decision did that; responsible; ethical, you think? Respecting human rights; do you? My right is to have a phone as I bought it; all I buy from you is airtime and the carriage of my data packets, that’s all; nothing more. Do that and you might begin to be ethical and make things better for people, but at the moment you are just dishing out grief.

To #makeitright I suggest you ask one of your developers to write an app to remove your pernicious dreadful defiling dross. Get the app written; release it into the wild and apologise. Go on #makeitright!

And while I’m talking about #makeitright, why is it that the data rate for a text message or multimedia messages per megabyte costs tens or hundreds of times the cost of a IP data per megabyte. I’ve never understood why you do that; ethical, responsible? No, I don’t think so; and I bet you don’t too. Go on Dave, #makeitright!

To continue about making things better; who on earth designed your logo? Was it even designed professionally? There are no two ways about it, Dave, it is ugly and to me, meaningless. I hope you didn’t pay much for it! The blooming thing is a lighthouse consuming God-knows-what number of milli-Watts before the phone’s brightness control comes on stream. It blasts the screen with full power to every red, green and blue light emitting diode. (Yes, I had an OLED screen.) That’s really clever of Three isn’t- help deplete the battery for no good reason; (that’s irony there, Dave). Save battery! Invert the colours! Save lives! Invert the colours! (Wasn’t there a French hostage recently too afraid to turn her phone on, fearing the screen light would be spotted by her captor?) But you haven’t thought around this have you? You’ve been there long enough in Maidenhead though. Shame on you. Perhaps you’ve risen to peak incompetence – I don’t want to be be rude but people in Human Systems sometimes do get to a level and coast along in a fuddle. Is that you now, Dave?

So – where did we get to. We decided you are a policy-on-paper sort of guy, rather than actually putting policy into action. I don’t suppose anything I say will get you to change. People don’t generally. But optimism drives me to give it a go!

Guys on xda-developers.com tell me that only Three in the UK customize the Huawei splash screens with their logo. I wonder why the others were so constrained? What do they know that you don’t,, Dave? Perhaps they are more policy-in-practice people – do you think that might be it? Perhaps they listen to their customers, Dave. Could that be it?

Now I started my rambling whinge, for this is what it is, saying that all the dross you’ve been putting my way started 9 months ago. I was in New Zealand visiting my grandchildren when my phone rang in the middle of the night (New Zealand is 13 hours ahead, remember). Next morning a web-search revealed it was your lot; making a sales call I suppose. And it kept on happening.

My sister, back in the UK, was quite ill at the time and I needed to check who was calling because the call could be important. But Three kept ringing me nightly – 2 or 3 am. Each time I duly refused the call. Eventually I downloaded a call blocker. But that did little good because you’ve got many conjugations of number endings for your call-centre. So I might block 0333 338 1021 but next time the last two-digits would be something else. So all that repeated calling you do when calls are declined, ‘ethical’ is it, Dave, in your book?

Repeated calling in the middle of the night; ‘using innovation to make things better for our people, customers and communities’. Could Three not detect I was roaming, Dave? Did no-one there ever think that calls might be a nuisance in different time zones, Dave? (Dave, know this: I, and many other people, always find them intrusive, I’m a pro-active consumer, Dave. I tell you what I want. I don’t want you telling me; ever.) Whenever I sign-up anywhere I always refuse marketing. Its academic now, the GDPR will close your abuse-of-process down. From today your customers can set the dogs on you; and about time too.

But you are a policy-on-paper guy. You don’t have to worry about all this do you? The web page looks lovely; that’ll get the punters in! You’ve got to have come from a PR/Marketing background haven’t you? You are not like normal people. I met a woman once who was a rep for a pet food company. She really believed her products were superior to those of her company’s competitors. Is that it, Dave? Do you think Three is superior? Let reality bite, mate. Take a user-trip around Three as any customer might. You’ve never done that, have you?

I walked into a Three shop today and discovered that because I’m SIM only I don’t get access to your 800MHz band; ‘4G Voice’ I think he called it. Why, Dave? My money not good enough? Why am I on a second-class tier with less signal strength in buildings and in the wilds than those Three users who bought a Three phone? That cannot be right, Dave, can it? You are not really ‘respecting human rights’ by discriminating against me, are you. (I agree, a bit of a stretch this one but I could probably make a good case if I gave it some thought.)

Ah! I just had a thought. The FCC in the USA, most likely on the payroll of the corporates, are trying to get a two-speed internet; pay more and go faster; is that what you are planning Dave? Some businesses in the USA want it; the thinking populace at large doesn’t and they cynically know they will get no benefit, just increased prices and slower routing. They will be screwed!

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I know things didn’t go too well with your OFCOM appeal, Dave, and you only have a tiny bit of 800MHz spectrum you got from EE. Shame! Are you trying to make a feature of the mess you are in and the tiny bit of bandwidth you have? “Let’s call it ‘4G Voice’ and no one will know what it is and we can use it for sales pitches to the undecided. ‘If you buy our phone, Madam, we’ll give you free 4G Voice!’”

Voice-over-WiFi that kicks in when the phone signal is weak was a discovery on the Huawei too. You’ve been with-holding that from me as well. And that is not justifiable either Dave. Ethical, responsible? No; not Three.

I engaged your complaints procedure two days ago. I found myself interacting with Resolver.com. Well, OK, you’ve farmed complaints out; saves getting down and dirty doesn’t it? I made a complaint about unwanted Three branding defiling my property. The quite-serious complaint I’ve already explained to you was sent off. I received a message back the following day asking for name, address and phone number. All that information I gave the day before and was on the form that Resolver returned, printed plainly as part of the message. Clearly the handler decided to bat the case away for someone else to deal with. It happens. On my watch they would be helped to find employment suitable for their aptitude. Also, though, I was asked for my Date of Birth. I refused to give it. All the stuff I was being asked is exactly the kind of information hackers use to take over an identity. And I know nothing of Resolver.com and their bona fides. Now with GDPR you might think a bit more about the stuff you ask for. I would be identifiable to Three well enough from my name and telephone number; the last four digits of my bank account, the account which you debit monthly, would prove it was I. A small system change made by Three now and a future data leak at Resolver.com becomes less concerning. Got anyone in IT thinking about this? They probably do and already have. You look a fun guy though, I guess the golf course beckons quite often so you don’t get to hear wise counsel all that much. You’ve written your policy – and – well - the place runs itself doesn’t it?

And finally, today I contacted Three for a PAC code. Annie, bless her, was in an Indian call centre. She couldn’t understand me and I couldn’t understand her. Oh!! What a time we had, Annie and I! If communications engineering is your thing, then you’ll know preventing extraneous signal noise is vital. The noise on the channel this time though was not about signal processing, but simply human variation and accents, plus age-related hearing loss, all conspiring to make verbal communication difficult and stressful. When eventually she accepted I really was wanting to be away from Three I got passed to Rama; with slightly better English pronunciation and clarity of speech. But she too thought I might want to stay. Reading all the foregoing you might understand when I ask ‘why, in their right mind, would anyone want to’?

What do I take away from this? Huawei and the big four UK Telcoms are doing deals with each other that impinge on my rights and resale value of my phone; Huawei and the big four are to be avoided. The others of the ‘big four’ are not nearly so evil as Three. I judge people and businesses by what they do not what they say they do. More vernacular coming; I’m still raging.

I was only paying you 15 quid a month so I’m of no consequence. Enjoy your 9 holes of golf and lunch but kindly know you’ll **** on me no longer. But, for heaven’s sake, put your company policy into action and think a little bit, would you, Dave!

Yours sincerely but still very angry,

ps. The resolver.com is still running; I have heard nothing meaningful today from anyone at Three; I guess it will drift towards the Ombudsman and OFCOM sooner or later.