MP Savid Javid, Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills tells O2 to 'sort it' over network signal problems

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-32878936

The thread on the GG forums is the usual comedy gold that happens every time they go down.

"I run a business and demand £100k compensation for lost business", "there are cheaper suppliers now and I may move to one of them" (right idea, wrong direction), "where's the compensation", etc

My O2 SIM seems to get a 3G and 2G signal anyway...

Sigh, lots of people don't have Whatsap, it was only one suggestion, but lots have landline phones, access to email, etc etc, If you need a mobile phone for something critical, (like the examples you mention) then you should have some sort of contingency in place. I agree, breaking down would be a problem, but hey back in the 70s and 80s, you had to walk to somewhere with a phone ! At least it's not raining heavily anywhere tonight.

I wouldn't know. My company supplied phone on O2 is rarely switched on at home as the network coverage is so dire as to be unusable most of the time.

They are always comedy, none of them have read the contract. They are on a cheap PAYG service, not a proper business service and they expect compensation for consequential business losses! Who runs a profitable business on a PAYG sim card from a non phone support providing company with an already bad availability record?

Now non PAYG O2 contract customers and business I have a bit more sympathy for as they are expecting a more premium service.

You would not trust them given they have so many outages.

They are meant to be the lowest network priority on o2, so that is hardly what you want if you are running some amazing busines that needs a reliable connection.

down here too

used to work for a certain phone network, hopefully they will sort it quickly and reimburse pay monthly customers, it was a blanket 10% line rental discount for tesco mobile customers, yippee a whole £1.25 in prospect, i would rather have signal thanks

Friend tells me hers is now fixed and work if again

It will come and go I think...

Normal coverage for Voice, text and email (2G)
Making calls, sending texts, using email on your phone.
Good indoors and outdoors.

Normal coverage for Mobile internet and voice (3G)
Fast networking. For smartphones, dongles and tablets.
Sorry, we do not have coverage here.

Normal coverage for Mobile Internet (4G)
Seamless connectivity and mobile internet.
Sorry, we do not have coverage here.
Mines ok.

Even though the checker says it's fine, take note of the red text and the service updates on the status page. It seems like an intermittent handset registration issue of some kind.

http://status.o2.co.uk/

Giffgaff have been very cryptic


O2 say

All okay here now.

Things sometimes break. It's not like they want them to. Of course everyone, including O2 want it fixed ASAP. (People demanding "get it sorted" - well, yeah! They don't want it to stay broken!)

It's not that things go wrong, it's how the company handles and communicates around an issue that counts.

It seems o2 does suffer from this problem more than any other network. You would think after the last major outage they would have something in place to prevent this.

Of course it means someone will have been called in on the bank holiday weekend to fix it. I bet they were not too impressed. Lol

Well it's also about designing systems that are reliable, redundant and where failures can happen without causing widespread national issues. This kind of issue should be a real exception and rarity, unfortunately it isn't on O2 who have had a string of them over the years.

O2 will have a network operations centre that is staffed 24/7/365 just like all the main MNOs. It won't be 1 bloke being called up at all, it is very different to that when you're dealing with multi-billion pound networks of thousands of servers, sites, 30+ million customers etc.

Are you sure? I suspect its outsourced most of that side of the business and I bet minimal staffing on the whole with the real techies on call.

If it was so well organised this wouldn't happen as the system would have redundancy or in the worst case it would be a hot swap of a server in a rack.

Well I thought it was ok for me but I have just checked my messaging app and every text I have sent since around 6pm is "waiting to send". During this time I have drove around 60 miles along the west coast of Scotland and they evidently have not been able to send during that entire journey, so if it is a localised issue then the locality must be fairly large!

One of my friends on Tesco Mobile had issues about 5pm.

Whether it is operated directly or not it will be staffed, and yes functions on call too, but not 1 bloke on call. There will be whole conferences with about 40 people and functions joining plus the on-shift staff if my experience of operating a large IT network is anything to go by, and yes even on bank holidays.

O2 used to have quite a good support team, it was UK based. Don't know what it's like these days.

Tesco's is also UK-based and are quite good too.

I was under the impression that Tesco Mobile customer service (and billing etc) is all managed by o2? That would make sense to me since o2 own 50%. Although it is entirely possible they have different strategies for each (much like plusnet and bt)

Yes Tesco is good. Based just outside Chester.

Not sure where the O2 data centre will be located though as depends who it is outsourced to, I guess.

Giff Gaff very cricptic with the post but suggesting any fix at the moment is only a work around until they can find the problem.

Customer support is usually entirely different to net ops anyway.

Wasn't that just relating to the website glitch experienced yesterday? I doubt the two are linked

In relation to this issue they said that earlier and this just now.