Data download Speeds - USA

[ThePolish1]

Hello knowledgeable people!

I am in the US for a week, upgraded my phone just before heading out here to take advantage of the O2 Travel Inclusive bolt on. However now i am out here i am getting barely 0.5mb on download and upload speeds! i can barely send an imessage!

I know that O2 in the past throttled their international data speeds, but when i was in Croatia in October 2018 i was able to use the phone without issue, so thought that they had stopped doing this.

Is this an ongoing issue or is there something off with my new handset?

thanks,

[Bambino]

@ThePolish1  You will not get fast data speeds whilst in the US. As you're only there for a week, it's not worth getting a local sim. You'll need to find WiFi hotspots, if you can.

[MI5]

The problem was fixed for EU countries but not for any others.

[jezza1234]

It’s all to do with the 4G agreements O2 has with countries outside of the EU. The data speeds will always be slower outside of the EU as roaming 4g won’t be allowed to go at full
Speed to reduce the potential impact of network congestion for home country users. As previously said WiFi is your best bet (just be careful what information you send over public WiFi hotspots. I wouldn’t log into your mobile banking app for EG. as information can be very easily farmed over public WiFi). Have a good trip though

[MI5]

Nothing to do with agreements at all, it's purely down to O2 restricting the amount of data that we can use so it doesn't cost them a fortune.
They tried to do exactly the same in EU countries until there was a threat of an official investigation and they fixed it.
There will never be enough O2 customers all travelling at the same time to the same place to ever have an impact on a local network's speed.

[jezza1234]

Not wishing to spend the afternoon on this as I have work to do. In my many years in the industry what you have described will form part of a roaming agreement O2 has with its partner networks to indeed keep costs down. However home networks also have a stake in this and as eluded to will give home network users priority over roaming users. The point. You make re loads of O2 users going to the states at the same time is a valid one. If it isn’t just UK O2 users that roam in the states. There are thousands of roaming handsets in use In every part of the US daily. I agree it’s not ideal. In addition we don’t know what restrictions the FCC instructs home networks to place on roaming data speeds. 👍😃

[ThePolish1]

Thanks all for your feedback.

When i called O2 on the matter, they ran through the usual, reset network settings, select netowrk manually, etc. Then once non of this changed i was given a task number and told that an engineer would look into it, to see why "the local cell tower" was giving me reduced data speeds, and that it could take up to 5 days for an engineer to look at this.

Now i get that if they cant fix it theyre not going to admit this straight off, if at all, but it just made me laugh that they would have me think that a UK based phone company will be able to affect an American cell tower. If this slow down is coming from anywhere, its from O2, seeing as my gf is siting next to me on 3 network, connected to the same towers and providers and is getting 8mb.

[ThePolish1]

So final bit of feedback from O2.

Just had a call, where they told me the engineers have looked into my case and can see i am indeed getting data and the cannot guarantee what speeds i receive. 

It's morning so i havent had my coffee yet, so i was probably a little more 'forceful' than normal, but my reply was along the lines of "oh so you must be throttling speeds in the US like you used to in Europe". Went on to say this was the same experience i was having in Europe a couple of years ago, a well documented issue, where i was getting barely anything and my partner was getting 10+mb (shes been hitting 24mb this trip).

The operator went on to say that O2 never throttle speeds, of course she has to say that, but that i should contact customer services when i return if im still not happy, and then quickly said good bye and hung up.

So to anyone having data issues while visiting the US, O2 will not help and blame it on them being reliant on the host network towers.

[MI5]

Yep, as expected.... 

[Matthew1]

I had the same problem. In San Francisco it was unusable: ten seconds just to send a whatsapp message. Speed test showed 2kpbs down.

Even with roaming off my S8 pinged the mast for 1kb of data daily invoking a 4.99 charge every day I was there.

Moral of story: do not subscribe to the Travel bolt on.