Hi guys was just curious if anyone here is using O2 as their ISP,

theonly reason i ask is because when i first got with O2 LFS servers were around 50ping at best in peak times, now its like 140 at best.... my download speed has also gone from 6000mb to like 500kb during peek times?

Im thinking they may have sold too much of thier product and the exchanges cant handle it or something??

anyone else suffer?

The same happened to me before I moved house. O2 were great for a while, but eventually they just got slower and slower at peak times.

There's no point complaining to them, because they don't consider it unsatisfactory until it's as slow as dial-up.

Seriously? i guess ill have to run out the year long contract too....shame really cos i was very impressed with them at first... until like 2 months in... which happens to be about the same time the money back guarantee ends hahaha ..... proper bent over with my pants down... ... o well nvm,

who do you use now?

Sounds like their service on your exchange has been oversold, yep. The problem is that "up to 8MB" can just as easily mean 56K speeds and there's not much you can do about it. Except leave O2, of course, and the truth is they prolly won't give a rats if you threaten that.

OFCOM has deliberately allowed false advertising and dubious services to thrive for several years now. The idea was to encourage more competition in the market, and the excuse was that that would benefit customers. The irony is that the effort to benefit customers has resulted in customers being institutionally ripped off for a decade now.

They're only just now saying that they'll "look at" the practice of selling a service as "unlimited" when it has a "fair usage policy" attached to it. If OFCOM weren't complicit, that practice would never have got started, let alone become de facto.

I just rang and they actually admitted the exchange was oversold, and work will be carried out "hopefully" (he used this word alot...) mid April time, we'll wait and see...

What ISP do you guys use?

Are you using their unbundled (LLU) service ?

If so, then it is up to them to add capacity at the exchange, if not then it is up to BT, and all non-LLU providers at that exchange will experience the same issues with contention.

I used to recommend an EntaNet reseller every time, but with the recent switch to IPSC things are not quite as settled as they were. Only a 1 month rolling contract though, so easy to jump ship should it begin to sink.

Well im not sure, i kno when i subscribed to it i had to wait for a BT technician to do... what ever it is they do at the exchange to connect me up....

If you get 'up to' 8meg it'll be through BT. I believe O2's LLU service is 'up to' 24mb ADSL2+ (same as Be).

edit: BT's 8meg network is pretty much nationally oversold. The '8meg' national average speed is something like 3.5mbit. The O2/Be LLU system seems ok though (I'm with Be)

yeah its up to 8mb

Quote from whitey6272 :

Well im not sure, i kno when i subscribed to it i had to wait for a BT technician to do... what ever it is they do at the exchange to connect me up....

http://broadband.o2.co.uk/home/packages.jsp

The one on the right is not LLU, the other 3 are.

Quote from Degats :

If you get 'up to' 8meg it'll be through BT. I believe O2's LLU service is 'up to' 24mb ADSL2+ (same as Be).

edit: BT's 8meg network is pretty much nationally oversold. The '8meg' national average speed is something like 3.5mbit. The O2/Be LLU system seems ok though (I'm with Be)

They do a budget upto-8 on the LLU as well.

The average speed is most likely due to line quality/length, I sync at approx 4500 and see about 400kB/sec download speeds...back in the day before rate adaptive DSL the BT checkers said my line could not support a 1mb connection, so I am happy enough.

O2 shape their traffic quite a lot too.

I'm with Sky Broadband, unlimited package.

No shaping, no FUP. Always get close to advertised speed, only thing slowing me down is the distance from the exchange, as a result I only get 7MB instead of 8MB.

I'm on 20mbit with Virgin. DON'T go with them, their shaping policy royally sucks.

Quote from Bean0 :

http://broadband.o2.co.uk/home/packages.jsp

The one on the right is not LLU, the other 3 are.



They do a budget upto-8 on the LLU as well.

The average speed is most likely due to line quality/length, I sync at approx 4500 and see about 400kB/sec download speeds...back in the day before rate adaptive DSL the BT checkers said my line could not support a 1mb connection, so I am happy enough.

Im the far right "outside are" one

Quote from Bean0 :

http://broadband.o2.co.uk/home/packages.jsp



The one on the right is not LLU, the other 3 are.







They do a budget upto-8 on the LLU as well.



The average speed is most likely due to line quality/length, I sync at approx 4500 and see about 400kB/sec download speeds...back in the day before rate adaptive DSL the BT checkers said my line could not support a 1mb connection, so I am happy enough.

My line is ok and i live about 1 minute walk from exchange, i USED to get like 6000mb

I'm also on 20Mb Virgin and i find it bloody fantastic. Their FUP isn't for everyone though obviously
I always do my big downloads in the morning or late at night, so its never affected me. I've not been throttled once. Never had any downtime either.

Pings are always great, it's great for gaming in my experience. I find it excellent value for money.

But if you're unable to work around the FUP i could see it being a nightmare.

Word of warning about Sky. For everyone that says they are good, i could find you 5 people that find them a complete shower of shite. I woulnt risk it personallly.


One of the Entanet resellers are probably a good bet still, they always had a fantastic reputation.

Just read the FUP's of everyone before you join anyone else. Truly unlimited broadband is virtually impossible to find in this country. If you do find it it's either going to cost you an arm and a leg or be very hit and miss speed wise.

Quote from The Moose :

I'm also on 20Mb Virgin and i find it bloody fantastic. Their FUP isn't for everyone though obviously
I always do my big downloads in the morning or late at night, so its never affected me. I've not been throttled once. Never had any downtime either.

Pings are always great, it's great for gaming in my experience. I find it excellent value for money.

But if you're unable to work around the FUP i could see it being a nightmare.

Word of warning about Sky. For everyone that says they are good, i could find you 5 people that find them a complete shower of shite. I woulnt risk it personallly.


One of the Entanet resellers are probably a good bet still, they always had a fantastic reputation.

Just read the FUP's of everyone before you join anyone else. Truly unlimited broadband is virtually impossible to find in this country. If you do find it it's either going to cost you an arm and a leg or be very hit and miss speed wise.

Yeah, I've read some bad things about Sky myself on the internet, but never actually spoken to anyone who's had a bad time, and I know a fair few subscribers. TBH they all say good things. Except about the router they stick you with (which is where a lot of problems arise... easy to use your own though )

Sky's contract doesn't even contain anything about a fair use policy or shaping. First UK ISP to completely scrap it, and it's not expensive, not hit-or-miss and really is umlimited.

Since they abolished the FUP, I've downloaded enough data to get my contract, had it been with another ISP, cancelled. Sky haven't batted an eyelid. Plus pings and download speed is consistently superb, much better then any other ISP I've tried.

I should have gone with sky is there anyway to get out of a contract with o2? would sky buy me out ? lol

Enta used to be absolutely spot on.

You had 6 centrals, the state of each could be seen on a webpage and you could reconnect to change if you were on a busy one. They always seemed to light up new segments of the centrals in good time so that you only really saw loss of speed at busy times. Even still, gaming/VOIP/etc worked fine due to the ALT (AntiLoss Tool) which limited everyones connections down in 500kbps steps until the load eased.

Now, they have moved from IPStream to IPSC. Everyone connects to 10 nodes, you cannot change which node you connect to should it become busy. The 'new ALT' has not come into affect yet, and noone really knows how it will work, although they have said that 'heavy users' will be limited in 700kbps steps rather than 500 at times of heavy load.

A few Enta resellers are now looking to other providers themselves.

im with vigin and argree with both moose and sam, their fup is absolutely shite but the service is otherwise fast and reliable, reliability for me is my main concern as for my schooling atm i require the internet so can have random down times or suddent extreme slow up like alot of the teachers do on who are on bt

Quote from The Moose :

I'm also on 20Mb Virgin and i find it bloody fantastic. Their FUP isn't for everyone though obviously

Their FUP is a disgrace. In fact Virgin are the only ISP AFAIK that had a FUP so offensive they were ordered by a court to STOP calling their service "unlimited".

I don't torrent, and have never had a torrent client installed on my PC. I'm not a heavy internet user, and typically consume less than 15GB/month. There are rare occasions when I download large files, but every time it happens I get capped for 4 hours. It blows me away that, with my internet usage, I can actually get treated like this. And I pay over £40/month for the privilege.

The £42/month 20mbit service, for normal adults, is available to them for just a few minutes a day, during the hours they want to use it. Once they've had their few minutes, they're capped to 1/4 speed, download AND upload. £40/month. That's a joke.

The only people I know who are with Virgin and think the service is wonderful are the ones that have never experienced a glitch with it. Once you hit a glitch, and you're paying 25p/minute to India for that joke they call customer service, you'll get the TRUE measure of Virgin Media.

As i said Sam, if you can work around their FUP its a fantastic service. Obviously you cant, so fair enough..move on ASAP.

I am a heavy user, i usually download over 3000GB per month (in my first month i was so exited at having 10x the speed i was used to i downloaded nearly a Terrabyte of stuff i went a bit barmy on HD rips.) I've never been throttled and they have never batted an eyelid.

During the 3pm-9pm peak i can game , watch a few things on iPlayer and do my usual surfing and i never hit the limit.

Im so used to not doing heavy usage tasks during peak hours (2 years with Plusnet soon whips you into shape on that front :razz that i just dont have any problem with it at all.

But yes..if you need to used more than 3Gb of traffic during 3pm-9pm then Virgin is not going to be the ISP for you.

There's no way of getting out of paying O2 I'm afraid. I moved house to a place with Sky already (not so bad), I got stung with £70 odd for leaving O2.

Quote from spookthehamster :

There's no way of getting out of paying O2 I'm afraid. I moved house to a place with Sky already (not so bad), I got stung with £70 odd for leaving O2.

Ouch, well maybe it will sort itself out... ill just ring everyday for a month and start annoying them... ask to talk to the person in charge everytime, should get on his wick soon enough.... jobs a gooden

Quote from The Moose :

As i said Sam, if you can work around their FUP its a fantastic service. Obviously you cant, so fair enough..move on ASAP.

Aye, if you have the hours in the day available to you (and I do, technically, since I'm home-based) then using time management you can circumvent the capping policy.

I'm going to stop calling it a fair usage policy, though, because that description implies that they consider the conflict between network usage and network capacity to be a matter of unfair customer behaviour.

The truth is that Virgin (and others, PlusNet being one of the worst examples) oversell their own product and fail to invest sufficiently in their network to provide the thing they sell to all the people they sell it to. In every other aspect of commerce, selling something you know you can't deliver is against trading laws. The common term for this is "fraud". Courtesy of OFCOM's duplicity, ISPs in the UK are effectively above the law. Disgusting, but what ya gonna do, eh?

Im on Sky Broadband Max, best ISP ive had so far, totally unlimited 16mb broadband for £10 a month is a bargain. Plus i live really close to the exchange so i get the 16mb.

Quote from whitey6272 :

Well im not sure, i kno when i subscribed to it i had to wait for a BT technician to do... what ever it is they do at the exchange to connect me up....

BT Engineers do ALL the customer installations. BT still owns the final mile, (ie copper twisted pair network between your house and the exchange), and so all work carried out on it will be by them. The network was only unbundled as far as access to exchanges by other carriers is concerned. In other words BT had to open access to their local exchanges to allow competitors to put their equipment and back haul connectivity in situ. From that point on all ADSL connections use the BT network in to the customer premisis.

http://www.ofcom.org.uk/media/mofaq/telecoms/bb_faq/