O2 Mobile Broadband Speed Test

philmcn

Just got my 02 mobile broadband package this morning, and I'm going to try it out for a month to see if it all works as it says on the tin. So far I'm impressed. I am based in Galway city, and I am getting the following up and down speed, indoors:
2043 download
270 upload

Can be a small bit patchy, but so far, I am plugging out the 1mb broadband landline that I have with BT broadband, and testing it out for the day.

Does anyone else have any good or bad speeds from 02 broadband?

biologikal

Might be worthwhile adding "O2" to your thread title. I'm thinking of getting O2 mobile at the weekend, so would be happy to see some other results from this provider.

event

my uncle has it, he said he gets speeds of 2.3-2.5Mb

this is in Louth

philmcn

I just tried it at home, in the country, and the speeds are way down! when i use it in my living room, I am getting 250kb download, but outdoors its much better. Therin lies the problem. Who uses their laptop outdoors all the time?

Yakuza

philmcn wrote: »

Who uses their laptop outdoors all the time?

Plenty of folks would use it most of the time. Sales reps for one, or any other user who needs to be mobile as part of their job.

Part of the problem is that this mobile broadband is being touted as a replacement for fixed line broadband (which we all know is sorely lacking) outside of the major metropolitan areas, whereas in an ideal world this mobile broadband should just be needed as a supplement to fixed line broadband, while the user is out of their office.

Ronan|Raven

I will be testing it later as sadly it is the only alternative to the piss poor wireless service I have at the moment.

philmcn

Have to take back earlier comments about slow speeds in house - I called O2 to complain, and they sorted it out. Apparently there are settings in the menu Settings:Choose Connection Type - which should be set to 3G only.
Now I am getting one bar (signal strength) on UTMS or one bar with HSPDA but despite this I am getting a fast 1.5 megs download speed, which is way faster that I am getting with fixed broadband from BT. I think I will be calling BT to cancel the broadband.

well done to O2 and lets hope this speed stays!

Sir Digby Chicken Caesar

let's hope the cap increases

elbow316

Guys, what kind of pings are ye getting with 02?

philmcn

266ms ping

RedorDead

philmcn wrote: »

Have to take back earlier comments about slow speeds in house - I called O2 to complain, and they sorted it out. Apparently there are settings in the menu Settings:Choose Connection Type - which should be set to 3G only.
Now I am getting one bar (signal strength) on UTMS or one bar with HSPDA but despite this I am getting a fast 1.5 megs download speed, which is way faster that I am getting with fixed broadband from BT. I think I will be calling BT to cancel the broadband.

well done to O2 and lets hope this speed stays!

Thanks PhilmcN, was wondering why i was onlu at 236kb for the past two weeks.:o

Nice one - back up to 3.6 again!:D

knackadog

anyone find that they cant access popular sites even though there is sufficient speed to do so. i have 1.5 mbps on o2 and lets me open everything except facebook. there is nothing wrong with the facebook server. never had the problem before saturday. got poker withdrawal symptoms.

KStaford

I use o2 bb in south county Sligo.

In the past couple of months, it has become over subscribed and now it seriously sucks during peak hours. From 6pm onwards and at weekends it literally grinds to a halt. Wen browsing takes forever and drops out regularly.

When I first signed up, things were fine, I was getting about a half a meg 3g and that was fine for me. All I wanted was good web browsing speeds and the odd file download. Now I cannot really use it unless its at 2am when speeds return to their normal. Otherwise its very very slow and unreliable.

Where I live, there is no alternative so I would say its heavily over subscribed.

Be careful, If I had dsl as an alternative, I'd leap on it right now.

martinm167

KStaford wrote: »

I use o2 bb in south county Sligo.

In the past couple of months, it has become over subscribed and now it seriously sucks during peak hours. From 6pm onwards and at weekends it literally grinds to a halt. Wen browsing takes forever and drops out regularly.

When I first signed up, things were fine, I was getting about a half a meg 3g and that was fine for me. All I wanted was good web browsing speeds and the odd file download. Now I cannot really use it unless its at 2am when speeds return to their normal. Otherwise its very very slow and unreliable.

Where I live, there is no alternative so I would say its heavily over subscribed.

Be careful, If I had dsl as an alternative, I'd leap on it right now.

it's the same problem over most of sligo, mayo and parts of donegal where i use my o2 connection, it was absolutely fine with good speeds (even at peak times) until a few weeks ago, i've been on to support and second line techs are 'looking into it' , so i rang back a yesterday after no improvemnt or contact, the rang me back today and offered me a free month and the promise the service would return to acceptable levels soon, but they couldn't say when...I'm not holding my breath, but at least i'm not paying for a poor service...

el diablo

I'm in the market for mobile broadband and I'm seriously considering o2.

Can anyone tell me is there any problems with speed etc in the Dublin area at the moment?
Is there special offer still available? the 30 day happiness guarantee....

biologikal

30 day trail still stands. Heres a current speed test, Citywest area:



Typical of what I usually get, and it's plenty fast for me. Others may have other opinions.

el diablo

biologikal wrote: »

30 day trail still stands. Heres a current speed test, Citywest area:



Typical of what I usually get, and it's plenty fast for me. Others may have other opinions.

looks ok, probably fast enough for me. think I'll bite the bullet.. cheers..

thebman

martinm167 wrote: »

it's the same problem over most of sligo, mayo and parts of donegal where i use my o2 connection, it was absolutely fine with good speeds (even at peak times) until a few weeks ago, i've been on to support and second line techs are 'looking into it' , so i rang back a yesterday after no improvemnt or contact, the rang me back today and offered me a free month and the promise the service would return to acceptable levels soon, but they couldn't say when...I'm not holding my breath, but at least i'm not paying for a poor service...

3 are like this over most of the country and if you won't pay they threaten you with all sorts of crap.

Just be thankful your with a professional provider that might actually try to improve the situation and not 3 who are comfortable milking it for all its worth while not investing.

I found O2 seem to be the best among the people I know. I used to hate this company when I was with them for my phone because they are nicer to business than PAYG customers by a long way (at least a few years ago) but this is precisely why they are so god for Mobile BB I think as their main focus is business which requires a reliable service.

Our sales people sell our website to clients and they used to use a local version of our website installed on the laptops. Now they can just use this which frees up a lot of time trying to maintain the above for client's that don't have BB in their companies for the sales teams demo's.

Of course, if the sales team start calling complaining that it isn't working, I'll let you all know, just to vent my frustration at the number of calls I get

JMURPHY3

The signal is very poor in country areas outside Enniscorthy......... Only getting GPRS signal in Glenbrien area.We are very poorly served by broadband.We might get Eircom in the next millenium, if we are lucky tho.Very good up the country in Tuam and in Maynooth area with speeds of up to 3mb.....

Firetrap

Anecdotally, it would seem that all the mobile BB packages are slowing down a lot at peak times. 3 are probably still the worst of all but I've a couple of friends who are with Vodafone and have said that their connections have slowed down a lot in the evenings of late. And now I'm seeing more O2 customers starting post here as well. Presumably it's because all the networks are getting more customers and it's stretching the infrastructure.

watty

You only need about 10 solid users on a sector of 3G/HSDPA to slow it to about 1/20th of the "up to" speed.

martinm167

martinm167 wrote: »

it's the same problem over most of sligo, mayo and parts of donegal where i use my o2 connection, it was absolutely fine with good speeds (even at peak times) until a few weeks ago, i've been on to support and second line techs are 'looking into it' , so i rang back a yesterday after no improvemnt or contact, the rang me back today and offered me a free month and the promise the service would return to acceptable levels soon, but they couldn't say when...I'm not holding my breath, but at least i'm not paying for a poor service...

just to update, O2 seem to have made some changes to the network for the better in the last few weeks, my speeds are running at a constant 750 kbs -1mbs most of the time even quicker early in the morning or late at night. still slower at the peak times though. ping times are a little higher (350 + ms) but i can live with that, fair play to o2 for making the improvements

jor el

Mine is doing pretty good today, 4 in the afternoon and about 300m from the mast.


Some days though I get timeouts and some general slowdowns. Was at home on Sunday (Wexford) and was getting about 380kBps download (that's roughly 3Mbps) and that was with 1 bar HSDPA.

el diablo

mine's as crap as ever and the connection occassionally drops. today's my last chance to return it under the terms of the 30 day happiness guarantee. Think I'll be paying a visit to the O2 shop in the Square very soon..:mad:

el diablo

I'm seriously regretting signing up for this crap broadbad service. my connection drops out every few minutes and when I try to reconnect I get an error message.

I called the o2 helpline today and they can do nothing to fix this problem. they blame it on a recent Microsoft update for Vista. I've just missed out on the 30 days happyness guarantee also.

anyone else having similar problems?:mad:

hideous ape

I was getting a lot of connection drops at first. I am living in the centre of Cork city.
Due to my crappy apartment, can't get any other BB service.

Things improved greatly when I got an extended USB cable and hung the modem from the curtain rail near my front window. Since then I have been able to surf and even stream live football matches ok.
Might be worth a shot.

What connection type shows up when you do connect is it HSDPA, WCDMA or EDGE?

If you are always on EDGE (no pun intended:)) then you might be too far away from your nearest Antenna/Tower.

el diablo

hideous ape wrote: »

I was getting a lot of connection drops at first. I am living in the centre of Cork city.
Due to my crappy apartment, can't get any other BB service.

Things improved greatly when I got an extended USB cable and hung the modem from the curtain rail near my front window. Since then I have been able to surf and even stream live football matches ok.
Might be worth a shot.

What connection type shows up when you do connect is it HSDPA, WCDMA or EDGE?

If you are always on EDGE (no pun intended:)) then you might be too far away from your nearest Antenna/Tower.

thanks...
at the moment it's alternating between HSPA and WCDMA but the download and upload speeds displayed look ridiculously slow. I'm not too sure where the nearest antenna/mast is but surely it can't be too far away. I'm in Dublin 22.

The customer service rep in O2 blamed a recent Windows Vista update as the reason for the connection dropping out and says I need to do a system restore on my PC to remove the installed update so that the o2 modem can function correctly.:eek:

hideous ape

It seems it's happened to a number of people that have that Vista Update

Found this here on Boards:

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2055289906&referrerid=59211

That seems to be the fix for the problem.

el diablo

hideous ape wrote: »

It seems it's happened to a number of people that have that Vista Update

Found this here on Boards:

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2055289906&referrerid=59211

That seems to be the fix for the problem.

ok, thanks ape...:p

biologikal

Nice speeds here today, actually, been pretty good these past two weeks or so - maybe some upgrade to the mast I'm supplied by. I know it's early, but I'll try it again in the afternoon/early evening, and see if it's comparable (wet day=more people indoors using internet, maybe).

Firetrap

Looks nice. I'm with 3 and this is what I got at lunchtime on a Saturday. My year's contract is almost up and I want to get away from them as fast as I can.