Why was O2's service quite so awful this year at Glastonbury?
I understand that the festival is in a remote area where the network is sized for one man and his dog so some disruption is to be expected, but most networks put in additional capacity - the service from O2 this year was far worse than the service provided by O2 in previous years.
To place a call you would have to redial maybe 5-10 times to get past a 'network busy' message and be connected. Sending texts you would maybe have to try a couple of times, but receiving texts was next to impossible, with the network holding them (presumably) to save capacity, and not actually delivering messages to my handset until 3-4am the following morning (when I guess the network was less busy).
Data services also seemed to be switched off for the whole festival, with the exception of the 3am - 9am slot each day...
So what happened? I appreciate that the area is remote, but oddly O2 provided better coverage last year than they did this year. Did O2 not bother putting in temporary masts this year?
Other network operators (Orange, Vodafone, etc...) put in extra capacity to deal with the festival traffic. My mate on Vodafone had near perfect service for the whole week on site. Why did O2 not make the effort?
Likely to switch to Voda next time around, at least they can be bothered to make some effort to cater for such events...
