The Phone Co-op Anmeldelser 

We were formerly (long before it became part of Midcounties Co-op) broadband customers. We had the experience then that it seemed to be difficult to resolve problems - we switched to a bigger more commercial provider and although it is not perfect seems to have better capacity to deal with things.
I have been a mobile customer for perhaps 7 or 8 years. I recognise some of the frustration felt by other reviewers but have to say for me it's been generally fine. During that time I have had a Fairphone 2 and more recently Fairphone 3 and it's all been good (again not perfect) - I wanted to review them here because I think the reviews are over-weighted to the bad experiences. I think you do have to allow for the fact that it's a small operator and piggy-backing. I've found customer service staff helpful and they're not second-language speakers on another continent which sometimes leads to problems with other companies.

I tried to order PAYG sim online (from co op mobile) but because I have a foreign surname the system thought it was spam so wouldn’t let me order. So I rang up and ordered a PAYG sim. I wait a week and a half no sim so (as I was wanting to change my network I didn’t have any credit so couldn’t make any calls so had to top up on old network). I then rang up and they told me to wait another day. The next day nothing arrived. So rang up again and they told me they would send out another a week later still not. So gave up. Then recon they send out a task to the warehouse. If I could I would give a zero star rating. Stay clear and don’t bother using.

Being with The Phone Co-op (Now Your Co-op Broadband and Your Co-op Mobile) has been a great experience.

Good prices, great ethics, ethical products and membership rewards too.

I have experienced one outage but this was across the board with Talk Talk and their third party linked providers inc. Shell Energy Broadband. The Phone Co-op kept in contact and confirmed when the issue was fixed.

During the pandemic half of my team of co-workers experienced repeated problems with the mainstream internet providers, not with these folks!

Thanks for a great service!

Last message to Phone Co-op:

Since the 29th July, you have sent me a series of emails and letters telling me that if I end my contract early, I will be penalised. Now on the 5th August you tell me that this is not the case and penalties are incurred only if contracts are ended some unspecified months early. So none of the previous letters and emails were relevant or accurate.

Usually when I have contacted a new broadband supplier, they offer a switch within 2 weeks, give or take a few days. So your request for a months notice clashes with the broader system and customers would have to contact you 2 weeks before arranging a transfer with a new supplier.

If you had not sent me any letters or emails, I would have made a new arrangement without any threats of penalties. At no time did I believe you were encouraging me to leave - I have no idea why you considered that to be possible.

I am leaving because during the period of the service you provided I experienced several complete outages and more periods of slow speeds. I can now get fibre services which are 3 times faster than your wire service, at lower cost.

Added to that I now have the experience of completely unnecessary threatening emails and letters, which caused a 72 year old recovering from a TIA completely unnecessary confusion and stress.

Frankly, I believe your customer support is in chaos.

- obviously, they ignored my email.

Amazing service, the staff are very friendly and helpful. It's great to be a member and customer of an ethical Co-operative. Highly recommended!!

Terrible organisation to deal with. I needed to replace my mobile back in March and as part of my drive to be a better person and do more for the environment I decided to purchase a Fairphone 3+. I bought it through the Phone Co-op outright but it took 10 days to get it delivered and that was after about 5 chase ups - maybe my business and money isn't good enough for them as I had to keep contracting them and they never rang me. Now I have an issue with the charger they supplied, again a wall of silence. A great phone but please don't buy from this company, go elsewhere for your own sanity and to prevent a long wait.

I switched to Phone Co-op for Internet and Landline with the promise of only £30 a month fee with £100 starter fee. I was happy till my first bill when i was charged £90 and then continued to have between £45-£59 a month taken from my account. When i questioned this i received no reply to my numerous emails and attempts to contact them and with my internet continously cutting out, i decided to switch to a different company that offered a better deal for less. Phone Co-op sent me letters, emails and texts within 2 days of switching saying i now owe £300 for cancelling but never mentioned my previous emails or letters! Avoid at all costs. They may be ethical towards the planet and their staff but clearly don't know how to treat paying customers.

I have been with the Phonecoop for some years for mobile (low use) and home broadband (high use, totally reliant on for home based business). I've always found them excellent - real person on the end of the phone when you call, happy to help with technical set up etc. Our whole street recently had problems because of an OpenReach area wide snag, and Phonecoop phoned me regularly with updates, as well as taking calls when I tried them. It was all basically out of their hands, but just the good communication made all the difference.

So frustrated at the poor service. The PAC code I received does not work and now I can't get any responce at all!

I recently moved from another PAYG provider to the Co-op Mobile Pay as you go service. I brought across my existing number and the transfer experience was straight forward and having moved across other providers within the last 5 years it went smoothly as before. However, it soon became clear that I could not send SMS to premium rate numbers for competitions. A support representative made changes on the sim to enable the service, however, that didn't work. Then it was found that I could no longer log into my account on the website. After several emails and phones calls to their support team (I will point out that they appeared very willing to help) everything just went round in circles and after a couple of weeks getting nowhere I gave up and have since moved to a new PAYG network which is quite impressive. I would not recommend using the Co-op for their PAYG mobile service.

I kept faith with Phone Co-op but disappointments have added up.
Not good.

Really disappointing service.
We had problems with the broadband, and were told we needed a new router, but to get one I had to sign up to a two-year contract. Big mistake!
I was told when I agreed to the new contract that if I moved house I could move the contract with me to my new house or pass it on to the people who moved into my old flat. I did end up moving house a few months later, and my new flatmates already had a contract, so the new tenants agreed to take on the contract. I called the Phone Co-op about it, and it all sounded simple - they just needed to fill in a form. That was in October. Since then the new tenants have filled the form in 3 times, and we've both emailed and called repeatedly, but we still haven't managed to transfer the contract over! I'm still paying for the service, and I'm lucky the new tenants are honest and agree to pay me back!
I should never have had to sign a new contract just to get the internet I was already paying for to work properly, and apparently that didn't even work, because they've still been having problems with the internet!
At this point we'd really like to just end the contract, but there's still a year of it to go..

UPDATE: I should add that the Phone Co-op have now let us out of the contract a year early with no charge, so it ended happily for us. I wouldn't use them again, though.

I too was with Phone Coop for ethical reasons but had no end of problems with topping up on PAYG. They say to contact them by email or by phone but take ages to reply. I am still waiting for a refund on my PAYG which I ended because they are expensive and once a company has made 3 mistakes they lose my business for life. Phone Coop have had plenty of time to up their game but they are useless......ethical ?...not sure about that...more like a scam. They have now decided that despite years of my business to not give any refund which goes to show that they are not even interested in 'goodwill' . Avoid them like the plague

I have been with the phone coop for perhaps 20 years and have finally had enough. We have 3 accounts with them, but in the new year we will be switching providers on all 3. The poor internet has been one thing, but the pathetic customer service has just added insult to injury. The final straw (after a week+ without broadband at home during the summer, for which we were compensated about £1.50) was being told that after my work broadband deteriorated to a point of being completely unreliable and I had substituted microfilters, cables etc myself and waited in for a BT engineer who I was wrongly told would come in the morning that I needed a new router. The existing router was only about 2 yrs old, but they would send me another free if I signed up to another contract, otherwise it would be £50 + postage. With a speed of about 6MBps that I have been getting, I have finally decided that enough is enough.

Be careful when using this company. My father had a faulty broadband router (it functioned for about 10 minutes at a time and then would stop for about the same period of time before restarting for 10 and so it went on). After a few phone calls, he was told he could have a new one that worked but only if he signed a contract tieing him into their broadband for another two years. One of those occasions when I wish I had been with him when he made the call but to me, that seems far from their ethical image. I guess if the new one doesn't work, it will have to be a case of flagging it with the regulator and if necessary the media, but it seems a really shoddy way of doing business.

I have been a loyal customer of the Phone Co Op for years primarily because I support the idea of co operatives but also because they used to have a really good & helpful Customer Service and were competitive.

My Wifi connection has never been particularly good upstairs and a few months ago I I contacted the Coop & asked them to address the issue or otherwise I would be looking for another provider.After a lengthy discussion ,the agent suggested that I should try using 2 booster boxes.He assured me the Wifi would improve whilst the increase in my bill would be negligible.

I agreed & indeed I do now get good Wifi upstairs. However I am now paying almost double. I have been emailing the company for several weeks and they intially promised to replay the phone conversation .Yet I have heard nothing.I can only presume that they have either done this and realised I was indeed duped or they have not bothered or they have not got the recording. Furthermore they no longer reply or even acknowledge the last 3 emails that I have sent over the last month.

I am really very disappointed at their complete lack of a service and the fact that I am paying a ridiculous amount which is far from competitive.

I will be leaving the company as soon as my contract ends but I would suggest anyone considering the Phone Coop, to think again.

I have used the phonecoop at two different addresses and though there are good things about them as a provider (great customer service, ethical credentials), I found the broadband connection to be poor at both addresses, with terrible speeds and intermittency problems. I just signed up with another provider who is giving us fibre for the same price we paid the coop for this underpowered service. And my god, the difference! Sad to leave the coop as I am fully supportive of cooperatives, but the service was just not fit for purpose.

Great customer service, often get the same person if you have to ring up and it all seems very personal and knowledgeable, rather than someone reading from a script. Reliable broadband and obviously ethical!

I've been a Phone Co-op customer for years; for mobile (three numbers), landline and broadband. They're a nice ethical bunch and all their customer/tech support agents are in the UK, which helps.

BUT I've had no choice but to transfer my broadband/landline service to a competitor who doesn't use their underlying network provider: TalkTalk Business - who have been utterly hopeless in resolving a fault open since May (NB: I am writing this in July!).

The Phone Co-op deserve their fair share on the blame for this customer care fiasco (you can deal with neither TalkTalk Business nor Openreach yourself: you are stuck in a series chain of the three companies). I must have made two dozen calls to The Phone Co-op to get this fault resolved, but it never was. Whilst some of the people I have dealt with have been professional, diligent and have called back as promised - Nick Kariotis and Mat Zygadllo deserve special praise for their tireless efforts - most calls (which involve a lot of awful repetitive 'on hold' music) have been depressing and amateurish. How TPC have allowed TalkTalk Business to do nothing to resolve this fault for all this time is shameful. It should have been escalated to a higher level after a few calls (and two Openreach engineer visits) but I had to do all the legwork and even then it was much too little much too late. Throughout this time I have paid The Phone Co-op (and they TalkTalk Business) for a frankly unusable broadband/phone line, and never once has compensation been mentioned to me.

So next week our line house will leave The Phone Co-op for a broadband firm that doesn't use TalkTalk Business, and I strongly recommend that you don't put yourself in the position where you need to rely upon these two firms to provide you with broadband.

We are on the £22 broadband package. Constant drops to near 0 upload speeds have disrupted video calls and remote working. I wouldn`t mind a fault, it happens, but I have had to call them 4 times to get anywhere.

First call we test some (not all) equipment in the house and advise to call back if problems persist.

Second call, a line test, I should be getting 7.5mb upload and currently getting 1 max, though the tests on my PC say 0. They are going to do a line test, `leave it with me`, says Mervin.

Third call, Mervin, who did not get back to me, thinks it is strange that I am getting 1mb max and often 0 upload. Once again, he says `leave it with me`.

Fourth call, 9 days have passed, I express my frustration as they don`t chase up the problem. We test more equipment, different cables, maybe its the router, maybe its the carrier.

Fifth call, the first time they call me back, the guy says now, after all this faff, I can only expect max 1mb upload on this package and he can`t explain upload drops to 0.

So, why didnt we test all possible equipment on the first call? Why did two operators think I should have 7mb upload and now this guy thinks its 1mb? Why on earth didn`t they call back until I had called 4 times over 9 days?

I am left with the impression they are not interested in finding and fixing the problem. Maybe its our equipment, maybe our expectations are too high, maybe the ISP is limiting the upload, maybe there is a line problem - whatever the case, just IDENTIFY THE PROBLEM AND FIX IT!

Faults are fine, but crap customer service is not. You can`t invest in ethical projects if you can`t get the product and service right.

One last strange point, they use feefo to show how amazing their customer service is, but there is nowhere for me to leave a review on feefo! Where do they get these reviews from? Why can`t I voice my opinion on there? If you want ethical broadband, there are alternatives with much better quality control, e.g. Which.