Hi everyone, just a quick question. I've been forced to use Virgin Media broadband for about a hear now (no phoneline in the house) and it sucks! They cap you after you download 3gb a day and there so unreliable round here. Anyway I'm moving in about 3 months and I've been looking into alternative broadband providers and o2 seem to be quite a good choice on paper. Good speeds, good upload speed and no cap. But the question is does anyone here use them? What are your thoughts on them? Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks.
Yes, I'm with O2. I live in a shared house and one of my flatmates had setup Virgin. It was awful - slow speeds, ridiculous caps and throttling. He left and disconnected the internet. I'm no with O2 and much happier, the speed is great, the setup is really easy - they send you constant updates when required by email and text message and the supplied router is really good too. No caps, no throttling just a really fast and cheap internet provider. Highly recommended. The combined price of the phone line and internet is the same as Virgin offer for the internet alone. Be broadband offer slightly higher speeds (they are both the same company now I believe), but if you sign up with O2 (and you're already an existing customer) then its cheaper. I only have an O2 PAYG phone and I still get the cheaper rate.
I've recently moved over to Be as they are the only ones offering LLU on my exchange. Be and O2 are now the same company as far as broadband is concerned and I couldn't be happier, no downtime so far, unrestricted and true unlimited downloads from what I can tell. I've only been with them a short time and can't fault them.
I have an iPhone so i am an existing customer so this attracted me to the idea in the first place. Great to hear you're having no problems though!
I'm with O2 and have had no problems, ordering from them was a breeze and the updates via text telling you status of the orders was very useful. even the wireless router I got was better than the belkin it replaced,
Yep - I'm on O2, and couldn't be happier. When I first got broadband (with Pipex), due to the length of the line I could only get a .5Mb service. During the years I was with Pipex, I managed to get a 1.5Mb service when it went rate adaptive and the limits came off, but couldn't get anything faster. When I moved to O2 and their unbundled kit, I immediately got 5.8Mb, and it's been stable at that rate since. Amazing. Even more amazing is that I only pay £7.50 a month for it as I get a discount as an O2 mobile customer.
For those with BE and o2 - what are your packages? and what download/upload speeds do you average? Im with virgin media and currently have a 20mb connection, I download at 1mb to 1.5mb per second on average and upload is quite poor - around 120kb ish....quiite poor upload, which is bad for gaming. What about you guys that are with BE/o2?
Well I have the Be* unlimited package, which is theoretically 1.7Mb up and 24Mb down. What I actually get is 1.65Mb up and 22Mb down. If I bothered to re-face the phone socket with a decent filter and mess around, I'm sure I could see about 24Mb, there are plenty of people out there who have!
I'm on Be unlimited as well, however the line quality in our area is worse than a bad joke so we only get about 900kb up and 15Mb down.
Wow wait a second - you guys actually download at 15 megabytes per second and upload 900kb per second? Or am I reading it wrong? My question exactly is despite what your connection is "supposed" to be, what are the speeds you get? Like for example if your connection is 20mb download, 5mb upload, just state that and then the actual speeds you get? Sorry im just curious as to how it fairs up in comparison to Virgin as i am considering making the swap!
I download at a maximum of around 1.4MB/s, but that's very rare. Upload peaks at ~120KB/s, but again, I don't use all of that in one go. I always leave some for other uses! Uncertain: What router are you using? If you get one with an adjustable Signal-to-Noise Ratio, you might find you can gain a couple of Mb without trouble. The default settings on the Be* router (and most others) are very conservative. I'd suggest a new faceplate for your BT socket too, a lot of folks see 1-2Mb increases just from using a decent ADSL filter etc.
I'm on Sky's 16Mb service and have managed 1.5MB/s tops download speed. Upload speed I'm not sure on but it syncs at 792k iirc. Seems to have sped up around Christmas as I used to top out at around 1.3MB/s download. £10/month on top of a SkyTV package.
I'm with o2 - my thoughts: Advantages: - Uncapped connection - Discount for having mobile phone with o2 - Great customer services desk - one of the few I don't mind calling - Reliable - Good price - Not Pipex Disadvantages: - Free Wifi box is a tad....cheap (Although never has any problems)
Amen to that. which is a shame, as I was with Pipex for years, and couldn't fault the service. Until they got took over by Tiscali, that is. It was all downhill from there, and was one of the reasons I jumped to O2.
15MB is not even possible in the uk (thanks to old copper cable instead of fiber), you have to divide it by 8. That is still 1.85MB though, so almost double what virgin gets (20mb from virgin here, max I've seen is 1.1MB, usually it tops out at 0.8MB). Uploads are slow with every isp in the uk (and almost everywhere in europe), 0.1 - 0.2MB is the best you can hope for.
I want O2 or Be. My exchange is enabled, but at several Km from the exchange, they won't let me have it. Currently with sky, getting 1.2 Mbps down, 900Kbps up.
