- Tuesday, 9 February 2010
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Simply put, you can't change a company without changing its management - Andy Grove - Only the Paranoid Survive
O2 hopes to fix crumbling network
UK MOBILE OPERATOR O2 has come under heavy criticism in recent months over the performance of its network across the country.
Until recently O2 was the exclusive operator for the Iphone in the UK, but all users have been complaining more and more about poor network service including low data speeds and dropped calls.
Under the guise of "anticipating growth in demand for mobile services," O2 UK's chief technology officer, Derek McManus announced that the company would be building another 1,500 network sites in the coming months, 200 of which will be in London.
"Our £500 million investment over the last two years has enabled us to offer our customers the best products in the world, including the Apple Iphone and Palm Pre," he said.
"In the past 12 months the mobile industry has seen an unprecedented change in demand. The introduction of world-class devices, in combination with a wide variety of data applications, has brought about a dramatic change in customer behaviour and created an exponential demand on mobile data networks."
The upgrade will cost hundreds of millions of pounds and starts more or less immediately, with 40 of the London sites expected to be live by the end of the year.
According to McManus, watching a Youtube video on a smartphone taxes the network in the same way as sending 500,000 text messages simultaneously - except that they use entirely different channels, but assuming SMS was sent the same way as data, it would totally be a valid comparison.
"We are now aggressively accelerating our network growth programme to ensure we have significant headroom for the future and retain our focus on being number one for customer satisfaction," blustered McManus.
To help prop up its service further, O2 inked a deal with Vodafone in March to share network infrastructure, with around 100 sites now doing so and more coming soon. µ
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I've been a customer of O2 for coming up to 3 years now (and I want my next phone to be an Nokia N97, Toshiba TG01 or a Sony Aino - but O2 shot their wad at Apple's iphone, so there's no chance of any of those!) and whilst I've had no problems at all with their mobile phone network, the same can't be said for their broadband. I've recently switched from Orange to O2 and as soon as I made the change, my broadband speeds dropped dramatically. Whilst once I was able to download files at up to 800KBps, now I struggle to get 600KBps, and as for online gaming I get 120ms+ ping times. It's almost as if the connection goes up to the North of Scotland before being redirected to Maidenhead and then getting put onto the internet. So yes, O2 crack on and either put your hardware in exchanges or at least improve your normal ADSL connection. Whilst you're on, stop making "Free internet" promises with your iphones or put them on really low minutes and texts contracts to compensate, and use the money earned from that to sell proper mobile phones which have other features, rather than a media player with a phone feature.
There O2 network fixed, now for AOL, does anyone have any nuclear devices to hand?
AOL?? Do they still exist? They were crap 10 years ago!
O2's broadband network, in my case near the Poplar Exchange is an absolute nightmare. They actually started to throttle the 0,5MBPS connection so now I get 14-26kb/s between 5-11pm.
You'd expect decent reception all over the central London area especially, I can barely get ANY phone reception and often have NO reception when at home.
I went to the lake district, in the middle of nowhere. I took my old vodafone phone and my Iphone. No reception with O2, full bars with the Vodafone one!