Orange makes you give them your credit card number. GiffGaff made me give them my drivers licence number.
I like that with GiffGaff I didn't need to talk to a person, just do it online, but in general you'll have to deal with this no matter who you sign up with.
I think even Imgur (Reddit's image host) was blocked at one stage.
http://help.ee.co.uk/system/selfservice.controller?CONFIGURA...
EE is branding confusion hell. They're a result of the merger between Orange and T-Mobile, but depending on situation you'll either have them treat you as an "EE customer" or as a T-Mobile/Orange customer. The only ones who are "only" EE customers in their eyes appear to be 4G users.
My contract was entered into with T-Mobile, and is a personal account, and I have never seen a block, including testing just now with obvious candidates.
[Edit: thanks to everyone who has replied, I think I will give them a go!]
If you then subsequently leave them for another network, you will get more SMS spam than you can possibly imagine.
http://zingongle.wordpress.com/2012/08/22/o2-selling-my-deta... for more details.
I mentioned before the weirdly broken system they use for this too - 1.2.3.9; 1.2.3.11; etc are all annoying IPs to use.
I too am on an "unlimited" account. Unlimited being the normal definition of "has limits" - they'll insert interstitial warnings about fair use limits and they'll stop flash working.
T Mobile insert <script src="http://1.2.3.8/bmi-int-js/bmi.js language="javascript"></script> after the opening <html> on every page. Pretty lousy behaviour.
I don't often tether but I do like the ability to do it.
"Tethering is permitted on £10 goodybag and will work on all smartphones with an inbuilt tethering feature, except for the iPhone." [1].
Not sure what the deal is with iPhone (I'm on their £12 option). All the other plans expressly say "Tethering is not permitted ..."
Hence it doesn't really address the "too good to be true" comment about GiffGaff in the GP.
£12 looks like surprisingly cheaper.
Also the coverage in this area is better than Orange. But your mileage will vary.
If I had to come up with a moan about GiffGaff, my only one would be that they send too many SMS notifications that I wish I could disable (i.e. they send me three each month as my package expires and then auto renews).
Orange sent me even more annoying SMS about things like "magic numbers" and other nonsense. So GiffGaff aren't terrible even in that area.
I've never dealt directly with their CS. Everything is online. So I cannot comment on how good they are when things go wrong.
They don't have customer support, it's community based (with rewards for those who help). They do have account agents for dealing only with account/billing problems (the only thing you wouldn't want to deal with on a public forum).
Not sure what the deal is with iPhone (I'm on their £12 option). All the other plans expressly say "Tethering is not permitted ..."
So they might need to pay Apple some £££ to get the ability to simply unlock tethering for GiffGaff's users.
I suspect that an jail-broken iPhone could tether on GiffGaff just fine.
Apple obviously provide the infrastructure for enabling/disabling tethering but I cannot see how it is in their interest to discourage it, except to keep the carriers happy.
But for the saving compared with most networks, those pains are almost irrelevant and you can get even more money off by referring people - it's £5 back for everyone who you get to sign up.
When I was buying my phone, I realized how much money I could save going with them. I could either go with a 24 month contract for 35 pounds per month and get the phone "free", on a contract which included 500mb of data, 1000 minutes and 1000 texts - spending 840 pounds in total, or just buy the phone outright for 500 pounds and go with giff gaff, spending 740 pounds over the course of 24 months, saving myself a nice 100 pounds and getting a better deal.
To their credit though when I made a formal complaint about the issue it got fixed within minutes. Plus its very cheap so I can put up with a little crap support (had much worse from other companies I paid a lot more for)