Be Excellent To Each Other

I'm so angry. So so so fucking angry.

So here I was steam cleaning the tiles and grout in my bathroom with the steam cleaner and the phone rings. I put down the steamer and pick it up. It's O2.

Brief history with o2. I signed up in October of 2009. It only started working properly last month. Before that I was getting .25m instead of the 6m they promised me. I phoned time and time again and time and time again it worked for about two days and then reverted to being fucking crap. In the end I just gave up inside and was prepared to do the typical Englishman and just take it up the fucking arse until this October, vowing never to use O2 again.

I also pay a premium because of where I reside. £17.50 a month with the discount. If my friend with a contract mobile ends his contract I will be paying £25 a month. £25 a fucking month for shit internet.

So yes. Last month it actually started working properly. So let's see... October - April. I make that 5 months that it didn't work for. That's £87.50 pretty much down the toilet. Incase you weren't aware how fucking shit .25m internet is? well basically it's not even enough to watch a Youtube video. So I have been paying £17.50 a month to use beex and facebook. What a fucking bargain

So yes. Last month it finally starts working properly. Hurrah ! I decide that instead of ripping my South Park seasons from DVD to divx (as I don't even really know how yet I know it's time consuming) that I would just download them from torrents. Not only that but I have downloaded about three demos through steam.

Fast forward to the phone call. I answer it, it's O2 calling to bitch me out for using 51gb of bandwidth. How I got through the call without telling her to fuck off I will never know. Instead I just pointed out how they needed a contract to hook me into their crappy broadband and then phoned to bitch at me when it finally did what it was supposed to do. I also pointed out how it was far more expensive than any other broadband package before putting the phone down on her.

I'm so fucking angry I am shaking. Seriously where do these fucking cunts get off? Best internet in the country my fucking arse.

You're always angry.

Have you considered Yoga?

We actually already have a "fuck O2" thread. I think we might need two though.

Don't O2 throttle bandwidth if you use "too much"?

You're not on an O2-enabled exchange, didn't read the not-so-fine print about extra limits on BT-network connections, and now are angry that they're pulling you up on hitting them?

It's shit that you got months of crap speed but they didn't "promise" you 6 meg, and being on a BT-provisioned link all O2 can do is keep escalating it to BT. Who will say they're not required to provide better than 128kbps or something equally shit, so if the voice line is working they won't bother (or they'll charge you £140).

@Grim...: Yes, on BT equipment they reckon they throttle P2P in the evenings, to reduce occurrences of phoning customers to tell them off. Maybe that was JC's original problem, depending on where the 0.25 figure came from (router, speedtest, torrent client, etc)

I get 1.5 meg.

Their promise to me when I signed up was up to 6m. I didn't expect 6m but I expected working internet for £17.50 a month. Before that I was paying £14.99 on Tiscali and getting 5m a month but had heard so much good about o2 that I decided to switch. I wish I fucking hadn't.

They harp on about how it's unlimited, how it's all great and then you begin to find out all of this shit (that you mentioned) in the fine print that according to reviews doesn't exist. What the fuck is so great about o2 then if their entire swagger is just a scripted pitch designed to get you into a contract? Fuck all, that's what. If there's no actual product at the end of their bullshit then it is what it is, shit with a sales pitch (and over priced shit at that).

Basically until last month it simply was not working properly. It wasn't throttling, it wasn't traffic shaping it just simply did not work. On the rare occasion that I connected via Maidenhead it was usable. I would get about 2m which is enough to watch a youtube video or Iplayer or what not. However for the most part I was connecting through Birmingham 400 or so miles away with ping times of over 125ms. Fucking awful. Time and time again I phoned them up and time and time again I would get Maidenhead for another day or two after phoning them and then every time it would simply revert back to fucking miles away and simply not work.

I've had no apology, no call back (like they promise to make sure you're still working well) and nothing else. Just fuckin lies when I phone in and a day or so. Seriously I actually gave up and resigned myself to being ass fucked which is incredibly rare for me.

I'm sick to fucking death of contracts. In the USA there simply wasn't any on broadband. I think it's because the govt said no to it. So you signed up and if it was shit you could immediately cancel and try some one else. None of this fucking guaranteed 12 payments for wank before you could try some one else, and then be conned into another 12 payments.

What he said.

02/be = great when unbundled
02/be = just the same an all the other shit places when not unbundled.

Apparently yes. Apparently they also phone you to chastise and fucking whine at you like some haggardy old woman should you dare to use more than 40gb. But of course, none of this 40gb bollocks was so much as fucking uttered when you sign up. When you sign up it's completely uncapped unthrottled and unlimited.

These things are mentioned, vaguely, in the T&Cs you state you've read and agreed to before ordering, just like with every other ISP. Also you somehow seem to be missing the "up to" in your "promised me up to 6meg" statement. Just because it's less than you got before doesn't make it a lie. It makes it shit, and a BT cockup.

Anyway, I'm probably coming across as an O2 fanboy. I'm not (well, I kind of am, but only because unlike you I've had nothing but excellent service and support, whereas every other ISP I've used has annoyed me in some smaller or larger way), but it does seem like some of your anger is derived from not reading stuff properly. It also sounds like your telephone manner possibly has something to do with the attitude you say O2 staff take with you.

Yes but you have not had the apalling service I have. And to cap off that apalling service when it finally does work and I use it I get phoned up and whined at.

As for my manner on the phone? I can not even begin to tell you how many times I have called them looking for help only to get palmed off. Now I am sure that if they had known how to fix my issue then they may well have done and I would be a happy bunny. Unfortunately I think either they did not know how to fix it or simply could not. If it was the latter? then they should have told me and offered me the chance to go elsewhere. Not keep lying to me and charging me.

I can see you're a bit of a fan boy, but tell me this. If you paid £17.50 a month for internet that was so bad you could not even watch a video on Youtube for five months and then when it finally did work you decided to cane some bandwidth (as you'd been paying for it all along yet not getting it) and they phoned you to whine about it would you be pissed off?

I thought so. If not then please phone Coffey's Fantastic Fresh Air company. I will charge you £20 a month for some fresh air that you probably will (not) get depending on where you live. It's unlimited, yet if you take more than 30 litres a month I will phone you up to bitch at you like a vapid old woman.

Who you going to change to when the O2 contract ends?

Sky.

I'm currently with O2 and it does disconnect briefly from time to time. Overall though it's pretty good.

Don't O2 give you a 30-day period where you can cancel and pay nothing if you're not happy? Sounds like you fucked yourself, if you actually did ring them early and get fobbed off.

I fucked myself yes. By simply believing what I had heard. That they were good and not a load of festering arse crust.

I'm with Sky and HC was told in a conversation she had with them last month that we used >100Gb in the previous month. I really couldn't fathom how the hell I was using that amount of bandwidth.

They didn't have a problem by the way, it was just mentioned in passing.

Dhalsim-JC photochop plz

Also, 51GB in a month? That's sounds like quite a lot to me (I download quite a lot but don't leave my computer on 24/7, in fact I only leave it on overnight if I'm DLing something big or it is going slowly). If all they did was have a moan, and not actually do anything else maybe you'd be better just shrugging it off instead of taking it to heart.

I'm with SKY.

Internet works and naked wimmins appear on my computer screen so it's all good. Can't really see how people can "rate" a broadband provider, it either works or it doesn't.

Some are faster than others and better at making it work again if it has stopped working.

Of course, Sky are unlikely to be any better than O2 if the exchange is all still just BT gear.

Maybe, although it could conceivably vary depending on what sort of SLAs they have in place with BT.

If I had been expecting anything less than unlimited then yes, it's a fair cop. As far as I could see it I was paying for that service and had been for five months. Only thing is it was only as of last month I could use it, so all of the stuff I would normally get or do (like Steam demos and so on) were all on the back burner. As it happens last month I was pretty screwed up with my bipolar and a breakdown due to being given the wrong meds that I decided to brush up on downloads and get my mind off of everything else. I also spent many many hours at a time sitting on Youtube watching videos 'just because' as I could not before. Yeah 51gb is a hell of a lot. That's basically 12 series of South Park ripped to high quality Divx, around 4gb a season. But normally I would not download hardly anything and in fairness haven't since. And I don't see them offering me any thing for being a good boy or phoning me up to pat me on the back for not having any internet for five months.

I suppose it was just really really bad timing on their part. It's not the best of ideas to phone some one up with boiling piss already over a shit connection and chastise them. And it is seriously fucking annoying.

Either way in the past five months I have utterly failed to see or realise why people rave about o2 so much. So to fix that I will simply go with a cheap shatty 2m deal and not bother downloading anything if cunts like O2 want to cry about it. God fucking knows what this country is going to do if AMD introduces the Cloud or more games on consoles become downloadable. Whinge and whine? try spending the fucking money to sort the lines out. Serious what's their excuse? The USA is a hundred times the size of this country yet they have made the outlay to sort the wiring. Here? If the fat fucks stopped handing it all out in bonuses and actually strived to they could sort all of these bandwidth issues out.

Honestly I felt like a 16 year old who leeches fuck out of his connection being told off by a teacher or something.

Yeah but they're far cheaper and more honest about their 20gb cap. I paid for o2 expecting the best. It's the most expensive. I did not expect to get Sky all hidden in bullshit and lies and then be worse than Tiscali which was cheaper. That's the issue here. I'm paying o2 money for BT. I could have simply gone to BT.

Unless something has changed radically in the last nine months, broadband in the USA is shit, especially if you don't live in a city.
Let's go to our man in the field!

Our man in the field? I lived there for a decade in four different states and it was great in all. All of them had cable, all of them were either comcast or road runner and all of them offered uncapped 8m min for $25 a month. None of them were contracted either.

Yet in the UK I live 90 miles from London and there's no cable here and isn't about to be.

90 miles from London is about as far in the middle of nowhere as it's possible to be.

Rural broadband in the USA is awful. It's only any cop in population centres. Korea and Japan have some of the best broadband in the world, because they has the highest population densities; so the economics work in their favour.

*£17.50* is *not* the most expensive out there , i'd say its bloody cheap considering what i've paid in the past for much lower services.

I'm another on thats on O2 and no problems , however i think thats more because my exchange is LLU enabled so i get 'true' unlimited and a 16 / 17 meg line which is nice :-)

Prior to moving to O2 (around 6 months ago) i was paying Zen £35.00 for a good 6mb connection (up to 8mb) , with a hard cap at 50gb and was happy to do so because i had a rock solid connection and no faffing around limits (i knew the limit / it was generous / and i could pay to increase it).

If your not unbundled in some way (check samknows) then all the various providers seem to be offering the same stuff , your paying for the extras they bring , and in that way the only one i've used that i was happy with was Zen , but remember with then you would pay *double* what your paying right now.

LLU O2 and non-LLU O2 are basically two different ISPs. JC is on the latter, I think, based on how much he's paying. This is a "suck it up or move out of the country" issue. All the problems he's having (poor connectivity, capped bandwidth) are actually BT's doing and very little to do with O2.

What about now, after you've been told 5 or 6 times in this thread alone

LLU O2 != BT O2

JC check http://www.samknows.com/

will tell which isp are unbundled at you exchange

I've always found this website to be a little bit more useful than samknows.com

I had this on my O2 Access, in the first six to eight weeks it was a solid 7-8 downstream for everything, I could watch HD iPlayer, all torrents screamed down, the lot. I usually do about fifteen gigs in a month. Twenty tops. Then I started getting communications (not directed at me specifically) about people not being able to watch iplayer between eight and eleven pm due to torrenting so they were going to start traffic shaping at peak times. For me this wasn't an issue, I'll torrent other than in the evenings. Then they announced peak as being mid-day to 2am and said 'you can still download torrents, just not as fast'. Well, 10k downstream is a bit of a fucking piss take isn't it? Particularly as on top of this low res youtube can take five minutes to buffer a thirty second clip, iPlayer is unplayable in lowest res and Spotify can take upwards of ten minutes to get a track going unless it's three in the morning in which case everything is 7-8 meg again.

My evaluation period was the first four weeks, where everything was utterly perfect. I live right next to the exchange, there are 3000 properties on it in rural Wales and most of these belong to farms and people in their eighties.

And I've just had to cancel my O2 mobile contract as I waited fourteen months for them to have an upgrade phone under £100 on anything less than a 24 month contract (will I even live in the uk in thirteen months? I have no idea) and they couldn;t even admit they'd have the HTC desire ut in a few weeks when T'Mobile were offering me the deal of a century on an eighteen mmonth contract that was still so affordable it wouldn;t matter if I did move abroad, I'd still have had a bargain, so now my dial-up equivalent 'broadband' is £25. Luckily I've only three months of contract left. Never getting locked into a contract for BB again.

Oddly enough, Eve Online is smooth at the least obvious times and TV Torrents downloads come in nice and fast, as they must use something not being blocked.

Check the O2 forums John, citing some complaint handling body you've been in touch with sometimes gets you released from your contract and the info is scattered liberally on there. Or find out if your exchange is due an unbundling, after which you'll have a top-notch service, by all accounts.

Fucking shabby though, O2 Access. In fact it's downright dishonest.

O2 are completely shocking when it comes to customer service, as all the right people have said many a time.

viewtopic.php?p=129448#p129448

Wow my internet is back to being fucking amazing !!

That's about O2's cellular operations, which is essentially a different company to the ADSL unit. I've found customer service for the broadband guys to be very good:

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=4792&p=357742

Just phoned to complain. I figured I had better now instead of just sitting here.

Apparently it's BT that have asked them to phone customers using BT lines and complain to any one using over 10gb. Because of that he said if I wanted out I could give 30 days notice,

So I said that I would mull it over for a couple of days and see if they can sort the connection. I don't hold out much hope.

I think I'll just go back to Tiscali or get a cheapo deal with Sky.

If O2 haven't LLUd your exchange it's quite likely no-one else has either. Which means whoever you go with you're still on BT.

Yeah very true. At least I can get it cheaper though and just ride it 'til 2012 when they change the lines.

O2 is the most expensive by far really.

Now that's just bollocks. BT would love for you to saturate your connection 24/7, because they charge ISPs on a per-MB basis - changing to that model is where all these problems have come from. Unless there's some exceptionally weird contract that O2 have with BT. Still, if they're letting you out of your contract early that suggests they don't really want people signed to O2 using the BT network. The price of the package suggests that too. Dunno why bother really, it's just fucking their reputation.

Get a 360, then you won't be able to "evaluate" games any more. Problem solved.

Er - that's not true.

not quite. The only LLU I have is talktalk.

Unless you hack it. Or have Microsoft started try the whole game before you buy?

You get demos. Which let you evaluate the game before buying. As distict from playing the whole game before buying and then not buying.

I was actually talking about just stealing them. But yes, demos too.

Right, the O2 throttling of iplayer has kicked in at midday and the GP is about to start - HOWEVER they don't throttle the BBC news/sport websites so anything streamed to those as well, like life footie and F1 and News 24 is still watchable, mostly.

My AOL has inexplicably remained at a speed far in excess of what it has any right to be. I was simultaneously watching sky news and downloading Wallander off iPlayer earlier with no pausing. It's a whole new world.

This is on a line which still claims to be 512k max and is almost 4 miles from the exhange.

It can't last, too good to be true.

Jesus fucking christ FUCK O2 !

I really can not believe what just fucking happened.

Was sitting here minding my own business playing Yahtzee and listening to Faryl when the phone rang. I answer it, it's O2. Asking me if I was looking at a product on their web site last night. At first I was like, "eh?" and then I realised I was looking at the thing Bobby posted a link to. Joggler? something like that. They wanted to know if I wanted to order one.

I was almost lost for words as my mind raced for what to say. Then I spoke up and said "Ah yes ! that was it, a friend asked me about hacking one so I went to check it out".

At which point he said "Well that I can't help you with" in what seemed like a pissed off voice and thanked me for my time.

But the utter utter cunt holes. Surely that has to be bordering on fucking illegal?