Up until yesterday I had been getting my broadband from BT Total Broadband for 16 months. When I joined it was around £22 for up to 8mb speeds with a useage limit of 4GB per month. Because I wouldn’t call myself a heavy downloader I was happy with the package. Recently the price came down to around £20 and a useage limit of 8GB per month. However, I was experiencing some problems and poor speeds a couple of weeks ago so I was considering making a move quite soon.
One evening I went to the o2 website to look at the mobile phone handsets as I’m due an upgrade shortly. I was just about to click on the ‘Shop’ button when I noticed o2 were now offering broadband. I’ve been an o2 mobile phone customer for several years now and have had no isses at all. Infact I’ve often said I wish that o2 would supply broadband! The packages are as follows…
Standard: 8mb speed, unlimited useage, £7.50 per month for o2 Pay Monthly customers (standard price £17.50)
Premium: 16mb speed, unlimited useage, £10 per month for o2 Pay Monthly customers (standard price £20)
Ultimate: 20mb speed, unlimited useage, £15 per month for o2 Pay Monthly customers (standard price £25)
I opted for the Standard package as it was the only speed my line is capable of. Since I’m already an o2 mobile phone customer then I get it for £7.50 - a saving of £13 per month compared to what I was getting with BT. Plus, since they only just launched their broadband service 2 weeks ago they are not only giving customers the usual 14 day cooling off period but also an extra 100 days in which you can cancel and get your money back if you aren’t happy.
o2 sent me the o2 wireless box on Monday, which is a Thomson 780 router. My broadband with o2 was activated yesterday so I swapped my Netgear wireless router for the o2 wireless box and I find this a much better set-up - and my speeds have increased. I also like the admin panel for the o2 router which gives far more detailed statistics about the devices which are using my connection, as you can see here
So, I’ve been up and running with o2 broadband for 24 hours and it’s been plain sailing so far. The £7.50 price tag was one of the attractions, but also the UK based call centre and the other features of the package including 10 e-mail accounts (and POP3), 100 free texts to send to any mobile via your PC or Mac and o2 e-mail to mobile (free).
If you’re looking for a new ISP then I would definitely recommend that you check out o2 Broadband. Since you have the extra security of the 100 day money back guarantee if you sign up before January 2008 then it’s well worth a try 
01 Nov 07
2:22 am
The problem is, BT own almost all of the phone lines in the UK, and therefore it’s ultimately up to them how fast your connection is.
If the company makes a decision that the phone lines in your area are perfectly adequate, and yet they haven’t been updated for a good 30 years, then you’re stuck. That’s why I’ve only got 500k download at the absolute maximum despite having an 8meg contract. Nothing TalkTalk (ISP) can do about it, but it’s a better deal than BT’s. Still, 40 gigs a month limit, that’s pretty good going for £15 or so…
02 Nov 07
6:36 pm
For the past 28-36 hours I’ve experienced some disconnections as often as every 5 minutes (at it’s worst). Once the connection was back up I found that I was unable to load certain websites such as apple.com and twitter.com on my new iMac. I tried loading them on my iPod touch which uses the same internet connection over wi-fi and they loaded no problem - similarly my iMac G3 also loaded them without an issue. The only way for me to get them to load on the iMac is to either restart the o2 wireless box (Thomson 780 router) or restart the iMac. Of course, with the disconnections happening frequently it becomes quite tiresome.
I just called o2 Broadband to enquire into the issue and they are increasing the line margin to cancel out line noise, to see if that stabilises things. I told him about the problem with loading certain websites when the connection came back up and he was a little stumped but suggested it could be some kind of DNS issue. The fact that I can bring up those sites on the iPod touch and iMac G3 without error shows that it’s something to do with the new iMac. I have also swapped over my routers and used my Netgear but the exact same thing was happening. Does anyone have any ideas as to what this could be?
02 Nov 07
6:41 pm
*puts on networking hat*
Right, a few questions first: Is it your wireless signal or just your http?
Can you connect to your other mac’s share when the signal is out if its just http?
02 Nov 07
6:45 pm
Being mostly a Windows user, my first inclination is to tell you to load up the command prompt and type ipconfig /release then ipconfig /renew. I’ll have to find the Mac equivalent:
*Noobish searching around Mac OS*
Found it. Forgive me if this is painfully obvious and you’ve already tried it.
System Preferences, Network, TCP/IP and click the button that says “Renew DHCP Lease”. This should get your iMac to refresh its IP address on your LAN and allow you to reach websites without having to restart.
02 Nov 07
6:48 pm
@Graham: I haven’t got my two iMac’s talking over the network yet, so not sure about that.
My new iMac and iMac G3 were both connected to the router via ethernet. However, I removed ethernet from new iMac and am now connecting wirelessly.
02 Nov 07
6:50 pm
@Dave: thanks for that, I’ll give it a go
27 Nov 07
12:10 pm
Thank you people for sharing your though and experience with O2 broadband. I am just going to write few words to share my feedback with you.
I have migrated from Freedom2Surf after four good years of excellent (solid connection) service (ADSL Max 8Mbps) to O2 for a better deal since I am an O2 mobile customer, knowing that O2 has acquired Be There to provide ADSL2+ up to 20Mbps and have their own DSLAM at the exchange
My line test showed I am able to connect at 19,000kbps Down/1,300kbps upload being only around a kilometre from the BT exchange.
Since last Wednesday I have had the service and to my surprise I am getting 15,000kbps download / 1,300kbps upload.
It does drop connection few times a day, but reconnects straightaway. The Thompson Router O2 provided is decent and works well.
Since last Wednesday I have happily download over 22GB.
Well I am still anticipating as to what will be the final speed on the line after ten day cooling periods.
27 Nov 07
1:48 pm
Hi John
I’m so pleased you are enjoying O2 Broadband aswell. Wow @ those speeds
Those are speeds I can only dream of as my line isn’t capable of more than 4MB! But, the speeds I get on O2 Broadband go way beyond what I was getting with BT before this, so I’m very happy 
Yeah, the Thompson Router works very well. When I received it I had planned on continuing to use my Netgear but once I’d tried this and noted the detailed stats in the admin panel then I have no plans on switching back to the old one.
01 Dec 07
3:44 am
I am hoping that someone will be able to advise me on the following issue,
I was connected to the O2 network very recently, and i have been unnable to Ping my O2 External IP from a thrid party internet connection. I need to be able to do this so i can view my IP camera from an external (WAN) IP address.
I have been advised by O2 that the IP address is invisible, however i think the person whom i was talking with was unsure them selves as it does not make sense for a IP to be invisible, as it is compulsory for the router to have an internal and external address for the connection to work.
thanks
05 Dec 07
5:19 pm
Hey Mo, I am also with O2 since two weeks ago, speed wise look good at 15,580kbps down. But its does drop connection few time everyday.
Anyway about your external IP, if you are not able to ping your IP from external network then I would assume that they have disabled the ping IP on their router and there is not much you can do with configuration on the router.
O2 router has very little hardware based control.
At my work I use a DrayTek Vigor2800 router which gives you much greater facilities as to what you want to control.
Anyway, good luck with your O2 Broadband.
05 Dec 07
5:32 pm
John - my broadband used to disconnect a few times a day so I called them up and they slightly increased the line margin (think that’s what it was) to 9db. They said I had quite a bit of line noise which was possibly why I was getting cut off every now and again. Then after a week of that there was a couple more disconnections per day so they increased it to 12.5db and now there’s no disconnects. They say increasing the margin will slightly affect the speed but I don’t think you’d notice it too much.
17 Dec 07
3:14 pm
Mo - As John West said the Thompson router which O2 provide does not respond to ping requests from the internet.
John West - Call O2 and ask them to change increase your noise margin a notch. This should reduce your disconnections. Also it is possible to access the router through telnet. There is a superuser account which technical support will give you the details for, or you can find them via google I have been told. Googling for the Thompson CLI reference guide will help you explore the options available to you.
Changing the noise margin has a variable impact on line speeds. I have seen some go down by over 1Mb when changing the margin by 3db, and others hardly move at all. It is very dependant on line length and quality. Hope this helps, and as a note, I work for O2 Broadband.
03 Jan 08
4:34 pm
Hey Sam
Many thanks to you for the advice, I did call O2 and went through noise reduction but it drops the speed which I wanted, so finally I decided to keep the speed to Max at 15.400kbps down and 1.300kbps. I am at work most of the time (Mon-Fri 9-5) so I only use evening and weekends.
Had O2 since 21 Nov 07 at 15400kbps and downloaded almost 200GB from rapidshare.com.
Once again thanks for setting up this website for people to exchange information and ideas.
Best Regards
John West
11 Jan 08
10:37 pm
Yesterday my other half kept reporting that he was losing his connection to our wireless network. I checked it on my iPod touch and at that time it seemed fine. We didn’t think much more of it until late last night when he was attempting to send some files via FTP and was again was unable to connect. I tried on my iPod touch and also on my iMac which I have connected via ethernet all the time despite it having Airport built-in. Most of the time it just wasn’t finding my wireless network or it would momentarily before losing it.
Since it was 2.30am I figured that perhaps we should just go to bed and see how it is in the morning. But, since o2 Broadband have 24 hour support then I thought why not take advantage of it, since I was still wide awake
I gave them a call and the tech support guy went through some steps. He was able to control my o2 wireless box from where he was. I was impressed. He made a couple of changes but we were still unable to get a wireless signal coming through, despite all the lights on the box doing the things they should do. He tried one more thing (not sure what it was) but also changed the channel I was on. Seconds later the wireless icon came up strong and we were able to connect. It was sorted in less than 20 minutes. I know I shouldn’t sound surprised about the excellent standard of service where o2 support is concerned since it’s been top notch every time, but I always am.
26 Jan 08
1:04 am
Mo / Sam / anyone,
Does the fact that O2 makes one’s machine un-pingable essentially mean that you can’t access the machine at all via the external address (that is, the one returned by whatismyip.com)?
I haven’t been able to telnet, ssh, ping, or access web services on my machine via this modem from any other WAN-based machine. I’m using the O2 DSL wireless box - with an ethernet cable; the wireless interface is disabled. On a Mac running 10.5, via DHCP. (My setup worked fine over a TimeWarner cable modem in nyc. Accessing the internet *from* my machine works fine with the O2 modem.)
If I want to host a (relatively low traffic) web site, am I strictly out of luck using this service? Would inserting a router into the equation change things, or is the O2 modem/router a brick wall in any case?
I’m not a net admin obviously - Thanks for any pointers,
Jay
27 Jan 08
1:29 am
Jay,
Your old cable modem was just that, a modem. The O2 wireless box acts as a router aswell and it is the box that is visible on the internet. For information to come to your computer from the internet you need to go into the O2 box and setup “Game and Application Sharing”. This is where you can setup what ports to forward traffic from to your Mac (or other device). Forwarding port 22,23, and 80 for telnet,SSH and HTTP would be what you need.
To be honest your best bet is to call O2 technical support, it’s not plane sailing if you want port 80 open for HTTP as far as I am aware. Note again I work for O2 broadband, but the technical support number is freephone anyway!
Sam, glad to hear support could help you out. The night staff are legends, personally I don’t think I could manage to survive working nights!
Sam
27 Jan 08
10:46 pm
Thanks Sam - that distinction between just-a-modem and modem-plus-router
puts things in a whole new perspective. I had guessed that I only needed to
use the “Games and Applications” setup if I had the firewall enabled - now
I understand that there is forwarding involved as well (not just evading the
firewall). Still trying to get it to work - probably call O2 tomorrow -
but thanks for increasing my understanding of things!
Jay
12 Mar 08
10:32 pm
Hi all,
I have had o2 broadband (standard package 8MB) in my house for the last 2 weeks and experienced some problems.
At first my router was kept on the ground floor (where the phone socket is) while my room is on the second floor. I could hardly get any signal and the connection dropped off every 2 mins. I talked to o2 customer service but after nearly 2 hrs on the phone and trying many different ways, they said it was because of my house structure (this house was builded around 1920s I guess) and because my room was too far from the router. They did also suggest some solutions such as buying a wireless range extender but I finally decided to transfer the broadband to another phone line (which situated on the first floor) as I guessed it would be close enough to get a fairly good signal from my room (please note that I did check the connection from the first floor when the router was situated on the ground floor and it picked up really strong signal). However, after the transfer I’ve still experienced very low signal (around 1Mbps) but one good thing is the connection seems to be more stable.
Does anyone know what may be the problem here? I guess it may be because of the router which from what i heard is not very good. I’m thinking of buying another router but dont know whether it can change anything.
Thanks,
Lan
19 Mar 08
8:10 am
Hi Lan
You could get another wireless router 300mbs draft n which would give you greater distance using wireless. Also you could get something called netovermains.
1. http://www.maplin.co.uk/module.aspx?ModuleNo=48539&doy=19m3#overview
This is the manual http://www.maplin.co.uk/Media/PDFs/a41fj.pdf
this will work so long as your pc and your phone line are on the same ring main. you can find this out by looking in your fuse box and seeing if you only have 1 fuse for your plugs. Hope this helps
Baz
26 Mar 08
11:05 am
This is all very interesting, im just hunting around for reviews on o2 broadband as i currently have Orange which i have to say are worse than rubbish and even though they have updated their router to stop the disconnecting which was happening every 2 hours (not good when gaming). After said update i am now unable to connect anything wirelessly which is a major problem for me as my ps3 is stunted in funtionality without the internet running through it. Anyway enough about me, would you recommend o2? Any problems with wireless connections?
26 Mar 08
2:15 pm
Hi Frank,
I used to be with Orange and I’d have to agree that they are worse than rubbish. I was just thankful that I was at the end of the 12 month contract when they changed from Wanadoo to Orange as everything went downhill from there on in, so I jumped ship pretty quickly after that.
I’ve been with o2 for 5 months and everything is still going great. No problems with wireless connections at all. I still do a double-take when I see my bill come through for just £7-50 for an excellent service like this.
I would wholeheartedly recommend o2…but I guess you expected me to say that
26 Mar 08
3:16 pm
Hello…
I believe o2 has sent me a thomson 585 router not the 780 model as mentioned above . So you people think is that mistake that they sent me a wrong one ???I have booked standard 8meg package if this makes any sense…
Thanks
27 Mar 08
10:56 am
Anyone know how to configure port forwarding on the O2 Wirelass box e0984d please?
Tom
28 Apr 08
3:17 pm
Tom Cooke … To configure port-forwarding on the o2 wireless box follow the steps below:
go to: http://o2wirelessbox.lan
Toolbox > Game & Application Sharing >>(down at the bottom) Create a new game or application
If you need any help drop me a email or you can also call o2 on 08002300202 (open 24 hours a day)
p.s - forgot to add, if you have new creame/white o2 wireless box then your a lucky one, that’s the new o2 wireless box with the new firmware etc
29 May 08
11:00 pm
I’m on o2 8meg and have had nothing but problems. I’m a mac user and it seems like the crappy router they supply hates macs, although o2 don’t think so. My service drops out about once a minute when its at its worse and about 10 times a day at best. It also seems to hate iplayer too.
01 Jul 08
11:28 am
@Rob…
Seems strange - the O2 router doesn’t mind my Mac.
*puts on networking hat*
It could be that the MTU size needs changing up a bit. On Windows for example, it’s default is 1500, but on the Mac it’s slightly lower at 1492. Make a note of what it was originally and change it about a bit - only slightly, though: if you go too far down or too far up, you’ll have complete disconnection.
Not sure where to find the MTU size - it’s presumably in http://o2wirelessbox.lan - but if not, O2 are open 24/7 on 0800 230 0202.
*takes off networking hat*
AJ out.
30 Aug 08
10:01 pm
Rob:
Make sure you have all BT Sockets which are in use “filtered” if there is still an issue you can call o2 technical support and ask them to change something called the “noise level” which will increase the stabilization on the line.
27 Sep 08
2:34 pm
My router doesn’t hate my Mac either, in fact they get on very well - both via air port and wired.
I only get 20-30% coverage downstairs, but the router is up stairs in the loft conversion so i can’t complain too much i guess! I’m very happy with o2 - especially as I’m getting the 16Mb package for £2.50 a month!
13 Oct 08
10:06 pm
There’s a newer post on o2 Broadband here if anyone has any questions or comments on o2 BB - http://www.fruitbytes.co.uk/index.php/2008/10/13/a-year-with-o2-broadband/. Cheers
18 Nov 08
9:48 pm
I’m having similar problems with my Macbook and o2 broadband after 2 months of ok speed and reliable connection. Speed has dropped significantly one day and still no sign of improvement after hours spent on the phone with o2 technical support
27 Nov 08
11:23 pm
Hi
Ive been with o2 for a couple of weeks now and had speeds of up to 17mb at first, now Im lucky to get 5mb.
When I had a look in the router settings (its the new wireless one although Im using it wired) it says….
Service Configuration
This section contains information regarding the service configuration currently applying to your O2 wireless box II.
Service Name: O2 Standard (modified by user)
————————————–
Im on the ultimate package so why doesnt it say that? And how do you change it?
Thanks in advance
Paul
30 Nov 08
5:37 pm
Paolo, your best bet is to give o2 Broadband a call and ensure that you are on the correct package.