Posts tagged o2 Broadband
From o2 to Virgin
181 year ago
For three years I’ve written about my experience with o2 Broadband. All sickeningly positive, praising the reliability of service, speed and customer support. Because of this experience I switched my home telephone provider from BT to o2 when their home phone service began in the Spring. It was this move that heralded the beginning of the end of my love for o2. It’s a long story, one I shall attempt to condense into a few short paragraphs.
Since switching to o2 Home Phone and Broadband my connection has been terrible. Really terrible. It began almost immediately from my switch-on date of May 20th. It came in the form of many disconnections initially, to much slower speeds, dropping from 3.5mbps with reliability to 1.5mbps with disconnections as often as every 30 minutes.
Many telephone conversations have taken place between myself and o2 Broadband in the last 3 months and sadly the relationship has continued to deteriorate. Within 6 weeks they send me 2 brand new routers (o2 Wireless Box II), sent me new filters, changed the noise margin on my line to see if that would provide stability and I have had no less than 3 BT telephone engineers to my home to check and repair faults. All these engineers left my property satisfied that the issue was resolved. Only it never was.
o2 Broadband told me that once they’ve run all the tests they can on my line, they will send out a Broadband Engineer, not a telephone engineer. Last week we reached the point where the tests were completed, but the last conversation I had with them was the final straw. I was told, by a lady at o2, that I would need to have 30 disconnections an HOUR before they would send an engineer to me. Yes, 30. It was clear that with my current rate of re-syncs that they just were absolutely unwilling to do anything more than fiddle with noise margins and repeatedly talk to me like an idiot, asking “are your filters plugged into your sockets?”.
So, despite still being in contract with o2 Home Phone and Broadband until May 2011, I have signed up to Virgin Media to receive their 10MB Fibre Optic cable broadband (and TV package). I will get 3 months for £15 per month for my broadband then £20 per month thereafter. This means I’ll still be paying for an o2 Broadband service that I won’t be using, from o2. It’s not ideal since I should be receiving a service that I’m paying for, but o2 have let me down really badly and have had little choice but to seek an alternative.
As many longterm readers know, I’ve been a huge advocate of o2 Broadband the entire time I’ve been writing here. I have converted many friends, online and offline, to o2. Now I am advising to avoid like the plague. When it really matters and you have a problem, their support just aren’t prepared to send the necessary engineer to resolve the issue. Their advert about nobbling broadband niggles is now laughable. And their telephone message when calling for technical support is equally so…
Did you know that many o2 broadband connection problems can be fixed by switching your broadband box on and off?
Ah if only, o2, if only.
So, after 3 years I am finally waving goodbye to DSL with o2 Broadband and when my contract expires in May I shall also be taking my home phone needs to Virgin Media. I hope that I have a better experience with Virgin Media and that support will acknowledge and deal with problems should they occur. From what I’ve been told by friends who are already with Virgin, it seems that they do technical support very well. My installation date is Saturday 11th September.
My o2 Broadband [rating:0.5/5] AVOID AVOID AVOID
o2 Home Phone
92 years ago
Whilst on the phone to o2 a couple of months ago to change my Broadband payment details, the chap asked me if I needed help with anything else. I said everything was fine and that I was so happy with o2 that I wish they did a home phone, enabling me to move away from BT and use o2 for everything: mobile, broadband and home phone. He said that they were looking into doing that, but I didn’t give it much thought until yesterday when I discovered that o2 are launching their Home Phone in March.
I’m absolutely delighted with this news. Being able to finally move away from BT is a dream come true, whom I pay in excess of £100 per quarter to for my home phone. With o2 I will pay just £20 per month for Home Phone *and* Broadband – a saving of £40 per quarter. They have two packages available, ‘Evening & Weekend’ for £9.50 per month and ‘Anytime’ for £12.50 per month – both package prices include line rental. I am opting for the latter as it gives me unlimited calls to UK landlines at any time. So, that together with the £7.50 per month I pay for o2 Broadband I will be paying just £20 per month. You can see details on the tariffs at this page and also register your interest, here.
Roll on March. It’s going to be a very sweet day when I can smile and wave bye bye to BT.
A year with…o2 Broadband
193 years ago
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 
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 
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