In a couple of weeks time it’ll be 12 months since I switched to o2 Broadband. I was reminded of this today when I received a letter from my old provider, BT Broadband, begging me to go back to them and in return they’ll offer me some perks like the BT Home Hub and £7.95 for the first three months. What? And leave reliable o2 that I pay £7.50 to per month all the time? “No!” would be the short and polite answer to that.

During my 12 months with o2 Broadband I have been asked about the service and reliability from a lot of people who wanted to jump ship from their current ISP. Given that o2 is a broadband newcomer at barely 12 months old itself (I joined a week after it was introduced) people were naturally curious about whether it could deliver the goods given it’s low price (£7.50 per month to existing Pay Monthly and PAYG customers for the Standard 8MB unlimited package). So, after 12 months I thought I could give my thoughts and opinions.

I can’t fault o2 Broadband at all. It certainly hasn’t experienced any teething troubles. In 12 months the only time I can remember a significant downtime was earlier in the year when service was down for a few hours. I called customer support and after getting through extremely quickly I didn’t even have to explain what the issue was – they already knew and assured me they were working on it. This isn’t customer support I’m used to. My experiences with BT Broadband were abysmal and the support would have liked me to think the issue was with my own computer – yeeees, my computer was causing the broadband to be completely out at the exchange :roll:

In the past year I have recommended o2 to a good few people – some joined, some didn’t. Those who didn’t decided to stay with their current ISP after they were promised better speeds, but are now mostly regretting their decision because their service has continued to decline. Of those that did join on my recommendation, the last time I spoke to some of them they’d just been turned on by o2 and were thrilled to be whizzing through the intertubes at a vast rate. To avoid repeating what I’ve already said, you can read my other posts on o2 Broadband here and here. Everything still stands.

So, to briefly sum things up…

Reliability of Service: I have had no connection issues. I get around 3Mbps which is double the speed I got with BT (which I was paying three times more for, incidentally). Unfortunately my line isn’t capable of much more than that and it does the job, until all the horrid old copper lines are finally replaced with fancy new ones by British Telecom!

Customer Support: Excellent, 10/10, outstanding…you get the idea. Call Centres based in the UK, swift answer, friendly, speedy resolution of any issues since they have full control of my o2 Wireless Box from their end. Brilliant support for Mac users. Faultless.

Router: I have the “old” o2 wireless box, a Thomson 780. I call it the ugly one since the new ones are smaller and white – much prettier. But, I haven’t had any problems with this and the Admin interface is very user-friendly and detailed.

If you’re thinking of switching to o2 Broadband and have any queries that I haven’t already covered then shoot me a question in the comments :)