And another dissatisfied customer. Same thing happened to my wife on pre-pay yesterday. Had to top up before she could use my shared data again.

2degrees really have lost their way and gone sharply downhill, and this has only accelerated in the last 18 months. I dropped them a while back, and over the last few years have encouraged many of my family and friends to do the same.

They used to be the sharpest priced, most friendly, most innovative telco of the three. Now they are routinely price parity to the others or even more expensive, are usually late to the party on features and promos and have easily the worst customer service of the three. It's genuinely impressive to be worse than One/Vodafone at customer service, but 2degrees have achieved it.

Now, to push a fairly significant change to a product's proposition, with what appears to be zero notice, and in a way that reeks of not really caring if you break the law or mislead customers - in fact, not even caring if you update your own website - it's pretty appalling 2degrees.

FWIW I can't remember the last time I heard from a happy 2degrees customer, but I hear from plenty of unhappy ones.

Delorean: I just spoke with customer care. Their reply was disgusting.

They reviewed the product and realised no other telco offered shared SIM with no plan for consumers. So it was removed.

The excuse I got was:

"We found it hard because sims are supposed to expire after a year of no topup and yet we've got a whole lot of sims out there that have never been topped up."

It made no sense. They've been managing this fine for years and it is easy to figure out if a sim has data sharing to it. This is all an excuse to cash grab but the way 2degrees have done this is actually rather harmful considering many customers simply won't have any idea the policy has changed here and why their stuff has stopped working.

Reminder - 2degrees have pulled this stunt in the past too: https://www.geekzone.co.nz/forums.asp?forumid=81&topicid=284198 

2degrees - I get it, you hate data sharing but your customers love it because it allows them to share data to tablets and even use IoT devices with ease. When you did the last change with the endless data plans I lost all trust in you and the brand and actually started shifting things away. I was a high spend customer with 2 connections and used data sharing extensively but these days I have my main mobiles with another company and only have the 2degrees sim as a backup and data share to only a few devices. It is that trust you keep screwing up with your customers that drives them away. Right now, I have zero trust in you and am likely just going to move away fully. You're not fighting for fair here and whoever approved this change clearly doesn't understand their customers or how much harm this can potentially do considering you have no idea if there are even health devices being shared to on top of the other IoT things.

I'm not going to bang on about this much more. I'm still holding back my words and as a moderator I could put some profanity in my posts to make more of a point. The truth is I expected this sort of thing to happen as it is just clear that 2degrees simply hates data sharing. I'm not angry, I'm disappointed.

I have lodged a complaint on Commerce Commission website regarding changing term of services without notifying customers.

Well this is a massive disappointment. Like you this is the first I've herd of this change.

My business has a pay monthly account with 2 Degrees. I've searched our email history and can't find any notification of this change.

This was the one reason we haven't considered moving providers. Now we will be moving.

Its a shame that the big players in the telco industry are in a race to the bottom, there doesn't seem to be a option for those that want to pay for a better solution with support (even if it costs more).

Another annoyed customer here, only found out this morning when my mobile hotspot device (which uses shared data from my phone plan) stopped working. 
No email notice/warning, only after logging into the hotspot device I found an SMS in the inbox (which I wouldn't normally check), which said what others have mentioned in this thread.

Might start looking at moving our mobile plans back to Skinny (were with them previously, before moving to 2degrees specifically for shared data).
May have to reasses our 2degrees fibre as well.

Seems like there could be a bigger problem. So I share my data with wife and two daughters. (Checked in the app and still there). SWMBO lost her data yesterday and did a $20 top up. That has just hit zero in less than 24 hours with no calls or texts. So I can only assume it's data usage.

I checked my account and all three numbers were active on data sharing on the 8th (from the usage) but from yesterday it's only me using the data.

Time for a call to 2 degrees :(

cshwone:

Seems like there could be a bigger problem. So I share my data with wife and two daughters. (Checked in the app and still there). SWMBO lost her data yesterday and did a $20 top up. That has just hit zero in less than 24 hours with no calls or texts. So I can only assume it's data usage.

I checked my account and all three numbers were active on data sharing on the 8th (from the usage) but from yesterday it's only me using the data.

Time for a call to 2 degrees :(

Thanks Scott. That was enough to cancel me on my hold with 2 degrees.

What on earth are they up to? A major change with no advice to customers. As the person sharing the data I have received absolutely zero information about this.

This is nothing more than a cash grab by 2degrees to push people to use recurring prepay plans. Imagine if they have 10,000 moving to a $10mth pre pay plan because of this. There's $1.2m/yr they've just started generating.

Someone wants their targets bonus!

The excuse given that "other providers dont do this" is utterly pathetic. Its lazy product development. Its unimaginative. If all the providers offer the same things then price is all you can compete on. I wish the NZ telco industry (and other NZ industries) would do better here.

nzkc:

 

This is nothing more than a cash grab by 2degrees to push people to use recurring prepay plans. Imagine if they have 10,000 moving to a $10mth pre pay plan because of this. There's $1.2m/yr they've just started generating.

 

Someone wants their targets bonus!

 

The excuse given that "other providers dont do this" is utterly pathetic. Its lazy product development. Its unimaginative. If all the providers offer the same things then price is all you can compete on. I wish the NZ telco industry (and other NZ industries) would do better here.

 

I am surprised they haven't changed the prepay to 28 days, so they will get 13 mths of income.

Damm - by publishing this idea the marketing guys at 2D might just do that 😂

antonknee:

 

2degrees really have lost their way and gone sharply downhill, and this has only accelerated in the last 18 months. 

The number of complaints to the Telecommunications Disputes Resolution service seems to back this up.  (A graph from this report is below)

Interesting and here is the information around mobile - 2 degrees leading the field again