When is ADSL not broadband? When it’s being provided by O2.

My experience with O2 has been exceptionally poor. I was originally given an install date of the 5th of March, but when this date came, and went, I called up to be told that my install date was actually the 3rd of May. Given that I ordered the service at the end of January, neither of these dates is what you might call “a quick turnaround”. I was given all sorts of excuses ranging from the snow disabling the engineers, to just outright blaming it on BT.

It was finally switched on mid-March. I plugged in the provided router and noticed with some dismay that the wireless only runs at 11Mbps, which would have been fine 5 years ago, but these days I would expect at least 56Mbps support. None of this mattered though because my Internet connection never ventured north of 200Kbps, and only then during the early hours of the morning. In the evening, it sank to speeds slower than a 56K modem.

A few complaints later revealed that O2 (or the providing company Be) was short on bandwidth and were upgrading the service, after which all would be fine. I decided to stick with for the three weeks they told me it would take to upgrade. This has now happened, and whilst speed has improved a bit (I can now get 2Mbps on a good day), it is still much slower than any broadband I have experienced and frequently runs at speeds below 100Kbps. Add to this the fact that O2′s DNS servers seem to fail or stall several times per day and you have a pretty useless connection. On top of this, it now disconnects repeatedly, and by that I mean every hour. And then the final straw to break the proverbial camel’s back: the wireless drops out every 30 minutes or so.

I can rarely watch video. I certainly cannot do any work. The connection is utterly useless and I am sick of it. No doubt I will now have a battle on my hands to get out of the contract, but battle I shall.

I strongly recommend that you do not bother with O2 Home Broadband.