O2 Data Network Unavailable For Hours At A Time At Many Popular Summer Leisure Destinations

[Capvermell]

I am now at the end of an 18 month O2 contract period on a 100Gb SIM only contract (my handsets is a One Plus Nord N10 5G unit that I bought from Amazon Warehouse for £160 in May 2021) and have been pursuing this issue of O2 data services both being absurdly slow to respond and then more recently shutting off completely for hours in many popular summer leisure locations (all of which have a strong signal strength but who's mast capacity and/or back haul networks are completely and utterly inadequate to handle peak time demand) repeatedly with O2's phone customer services team on 202, then multiple times with their in my experience completely and utterly useless and unfit for purpose CRT or Customer Relations Team, then due to their total uselessness and failure to do anything at all to actually investigate the repeated lack of data service I finally escalated onwards to the Complaints Review Service of O2.  The Complaints Review Service turned out to be even more useless and unhelpful than the CRT team and did no technical investigation whatsoever of any kind of my multiple experiences of lack of any data service in busy seaside and beach locations between 11am and around 5pm and simply deadlocked my complaint and said I could leave O2 if I was not happy.  As a result of this the matter is now with the Communications Ombudsman section of www.ombudsman-services.org

Surely multiple other customers must also have experience of the O2 network simply shutting down completely at the busiest times of day at popular summer leisure locations where a lot of people gather in the middle of the day and in my case in the Poole/Bournemouth area while last year my then shiny new OnePlus Nord N10 5G handset worked well on their recently activated 5G cell serving a beach location at Knoll Beach in Studland where mobile services were often previously overloaded and unavailable in earlier years on busy days this year the 5G and 4G cells are so overloaded with traffic they chuck you off on to an H+ 3.5G cell and that then that simply fails to come back with any response to requests for web pages at all.

O2's total failure to either acknowledge or properly investigate a problem that it has caused for its own network by selling far too many high capacity data plans on O2 itself and on GiffGaff, Tesco Mobile and Sky Mobile (as its more significant MVNOs) is in my opinion quite disgusting and shocking.  Most but not all calls to 202 now get routed to call centres in Cape Town in South Africa where some but not all of the advisers clearly feel no sense of responsibility at all for the network data overload problem working for an outsourced third party centre handling company in another country on probably very low pay.  But often the UK is no better and one lady in their Leeds call centre couldn't seem to understand that I could be in area that her coverage maps showed I had a strong signal but where no data service was available currently due to the mast cells being completely over contended with data requests way beyond their design capacity.

O2 or Telefonica's whole staff training in relation to this issue is quite diabolical since rather than ever admitting data is not available currently because their network is overloaded with too many data requests from customers in relation to cell design capacity they will always suggest the problem must be with your handset and can be easily fixed as long as you carry out a Network Reset. Alternatively they will suggest sending you a new SIM card as the solution as that of course wastes a few more days while it arrives and as with the 72 working hours for their CRT team to phone you back (except that they when they call back they always call for one and a half rings and then hang up so they can mark down that the customer was unavailable) or the 240 working hours for their Complaints Review Service to get back to you deadlocking your complaint but doing no investigation they are all obfuscations techniques designed to prevent Telefonica having to admit it has destroyed the reliability of its own data network in locations subject to seasonal and/or time of day related major surges in demand.  Yet a further obfuscation tactic that O2 has trained its customer service staff in is to always suggest that the problem must be occurring at your home address (even though most customers still use a much more reliable fixed line data connection via ADSL2+, FTTC or FTTP when they are at their home address) and to suggest they have not had any probelms reported at that postcode.  But when you then tell them you are at some beach or other you have no idea of the postcode for they then say they cannot help you without a postcode.  So if you then try and give them your current GPS or OS Grid coordinates using an appropriate mobile location App they then tell you they cannot use those coordinates to find your location.  These are all in my humble opinion quite deliberate further Obfuscatory tactics used by O2 customer services to avoid having to deal with your complaint about lack of data services completely or unaccepably slow data service.  Thsat is of course assuming the customer has not given up as they seem to hope you will do when some of their ruder advisers (especially in South Africa) suddenly cut customers off without warning for no discernible reason.

As I live in an area of rural southern Surrey where EE and Three's network appear to be especially poor I am planning to give Vodafone a go via Talkmobile as they can sell me a 25Gb data plan on only a 1 month contract for £12 a month.  I am reluctant to try either EE or Three as their service here at my home with my foot thick victorian brick walls is so bad that I couldn't even use my mobile here as a portable wifi hotspot in the event that my fixed line internet connection with Sky (via BT Openreach's FTTP network) goes down.

I can't believe I am the only person who has been suffering with many hour long total data network outages on O2 this summer in peak hour periods at popular seaside and other summertime leisure activity related locations where there is perfectly adequate H+, 4G, 4G+ or 5G data service at less busy and therefore less heavily data trafficked times of the day or year, and where phone calls still continue to work throughout the day even though data services do not at peak times of day, and I would appreciate feedback in this thread from anyone else who has been suffering with the same total loss of data service at peak times of day issue on the O2 network.  Not only do data services go out completely in some peak summer leisure locations but they are also in general getting much slower so that this morning at my home address in Capel, Surrey the local mast could only manage a measly 1.2Mbps download speed and 0.2 Mbps in the mid morning when 18 months ago it could do 4Mbps Download and Upload at about 11Mbps in the mid morning before they redeployed most of the upload bandwidth on the mast to downloading use to stop that giving up completely.  Yet this same mast can return a download speed test result of around 20Mbps at 3am in the morning.........................

[Capvermell]

@madasafish As a long time user of the O2 network I was unaware of these latest rearrangments of the corporate deckchairs on the titanic by profiteering big business

However the fact that the call centres of O2 are now run by Capita would explain their complete and utter dedication to avoiding the proper investigation of my complaint about their network shutting down for data access in popular summer leisure locations and for resorting as fast as possible to deadlocking my complaint while expending zero time and effort themselves on considering or investigating the issues I had raised.  Presumably they rely on the total uselessness and/or ineffectiveness of the Telecommunications Ombudsman to fail to hold them to account for not delivering me with a mobile data service when I most critically need to access it a large amount of the time.

I believe Lycamobile is the other large network that accesses O2 under an MVNO arrangement like Tesco and Sky Mobile.  I apologise for confusing it with Lebara Mobile.

However as I dislike all the corporate works of the Capita group intensely and EE is owned by BT (who I also dislike with a passion as a smoke and mirrors company that deliberately mistreats its customers) this leaves me with only Vodafone and Three as possible alternative networks.  As Three's signal does not penetrate buildings with thick brick walls and is deficient in its presence in much of rural Surrey this leaves me only with Vodafone............

What I actually want is a cross network roaming SIM on all four networks at an affordable price but unfortunately the only such SIMs are very unaffordable price since they charge exorbitant foreign roaming rates for using data on the UK networks.......

[madasaf1sh]

@Capvermell 

Your only option as a consumer is anywheresim - www.anywheresim.com and that is a UK company based up in Clitheroe, might be worth trying that one...

[MrShifter]

I'll leave you two to argue about which MVO is run by who, but I will support Capvermell in their observation of poor data on O2.

I too live in a coastal resort, (Exmouth in Devon), and any time the seafront is busy and especially during holiday times, any use of data becomes almost impossible. I like to walk the two miles along the seafront and in off-peak times of the year, usually winter, I can stream the radio or a podcast while taking my constitutional, but as soon as there is any increase in the beach population, especially during holiday times, this becomes impossible and even trying to summon a web page can be futile. I'm sure this is for all the reasons that have been raised before, but I also work away from home from time to time, and this can be anywhere in the country, and again O2's data speeds have gradually become much worse over the past few years, and I'm not just talking about in the middle of a field in Gloucestershire, it can also be very poor in many urban areas. Signal strength is generally not the problem and making and receiving calls is usually fine, but O2 has certainly overstretched themselves in the data department, and I don't think the merger with Virgin is going to help much in the short term either.

[Capvermell]

@MrShifter

Many thanks for confirming that in Exmouth you are also experiencing problems with O2's data services becoming completely unavailable for long periods at busy times of year for seaside visits (summer months on nice days) anywhere near the seafront and that you also confirm that this is not due to a lack of signal strength but due to data overload on the masts in question and/or the internet backhaul supporting them.

Anyway my complaint is now in at Omudsman Services but all O2 have done is firstly to try and claim that I must be complaining about my home address in Surrey rather than as I have previously told them multiple times about seaside towns such as Portsmouth plus Bournemouth and Pool and also nearly all of their rural H+ cells that provide coverage when travelling between towns on a train journey.  Also in any case their average download speed, even at my home address on a 4G mast with a good signal has deteriorated from a poor 4Mbps 18 months ago in the weekday daytime to 1.5Mbps now while Upload Speeds have gone from 7Mbps to 8Mbps to about 0.5Mbps as they have clearly moved more of their bandwith suporting their mast on to the Download side to stop it shutting off completely at peak periods.

Secondly O2 have referred to paragraph 2.2 of their terms and conditions and a paragraph that states "The Service isn't fault-free; a range of different geographic, atmospheric or other conditions or circumstances beyond our control can impair it. For instance, coverage is affected by things like the thickness or material of the walls of the building you're in. It might also depend on how many people near you are trying to use the service at the same time."

So O2's position is that if they have provided mast capacity that is vastly inadequate in places that they know repeatedly suffer large day time peaks in data demand in the summer that none of their masts (in the case of Bournemouth/Pool and Portsmouth that's 5G, 4G+, 4G, 3.5G and 3G) can cope with then that's quite alright as paragraph 2.2 of their terms and conditions says that they can simply fail to offer data services whenever there are larger numbers of people in a summer time leisure location that are more in numbers than the average number throughout the course of the year that is all the mast capacity they have bothered to provide for.  And this is even though their 5G masts that are surely designed to cope with huge amounts of data throughput and are only two years old are also completely overloaded too whenever their data network shuts off.

They haven't even bothered to investigate the actual data load on their network at the locations I am complaining about and they in any case try to make it impossible to complain about having data access problems in multiple locations in the same town or at a rural location without a postcode by always demanding a postcode rather than GPS Coordinates or an OS grid reference and also fail to provide any button in their app to report a specific location you cannot access data services at when this could be uploaded by their App whenever the phone was back in an area with working data service.

Rather than being shocked and appalled that I could not access data services for days on end for 10 days in a row in Bournemouth in August O2's attitude is that I am not entitled to expect their data services to work whenever they are incapable of providing them due to data overload and that the measly £30 or so they have paid me so far on a 100Gb SIM only contract that cost me £300 over 18 months (£20 x £18 minus £10 a month discount for the first 6 months) but that my average data use is only 10Mbps to 20Mbps a month (in large part because I can't access their data services so much of the time) is perfectly adequate and that I should receive no further compensation.

And they seem smugly confident that Ombudsman Services will back them up on this position.

But the last thing one ever gets with O2 is a call back from a concerned network engineering department that wants to investigate matters further and put things right...........

[Capvermell]

So nearly a year on from my last post but with the O2 data network's tendency to completely shut down for hours on end in popular summer leisure locations where lots of people gather in the summer becoming far worse than ever this year (2023) with most people out and about again as normal I thought I would update this thread a little.

Firstly I received a decision from the Communications Ombudsman on 22nd September 2022 that did not find in my favour on the basis of O2's paragraph 2.2 of its terms and conditions where it says that "The Network and Services are variable in nature and aren't fault-free; a range of different geographic, atmospheric or other conditions or circumstances beyond our control can impair it" but also that "You're entitled to the quality of service generally given by a competent mobile telecommunications service provider, using its reasonable skill and care." The Communications Ombudsman seems to feel that the problems I experience with O2 data services shutting off repeately at busy locations in the summer on busy days do not indicate that O2 is a generally incompetent and thoroughly reckless network that sells its customers larger amounts of data than its network is simply not built to withstand or cope with as I believe it to be.  I also don't see how it is that the regulator Ofcom only worries about Not Spots in the UK in which there is no mobile data coverage when UK mobile customers don't have the right to roam on to a competitor network in a NotSpot not served by their own network.  Ofcom seems to act like people only stay in a fixed location to use their mobile and can choose the network that does have service at that fixed postcode but totally ignores the fact that customers move around and cannot move to another network when they experience a location with no service on their own network.

As I have experienced lots of locations like coastal towns and repeatedly at Gatwick Airport (that I pass through regularly and stop for several minutes at on train services from Horsham to London) I have tried re-escalating the issue to O2 customer service at O2 who have promised me callbacks several times from their so called CRT network escalation team and then more recently from the CCMT team that is meant to be an escalation level above CRT.  But these callbacks to me from CRT within 5 working days are almost never made and if they are made the call always rings off at 2 rings before I can answer my phone.  And now with the recent escalation to the CCMT team two weeks ago Capita is playing the same game of customer abuse with no call being made to me at all more than two weeks after they had only a week to get in touch with me.

In view of the above I have now sent the following email today to O2's Complaints Review Service via email to complaintreviewservice@o2.com

This email reads as follows and we will have to see what response I now receive from O2 to the points I have raised in this email as follows:-

-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: Threat To Withhold Number Port, Overloaded Data Network + Deliberate Contract Misselling
Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2023 18:56:25 +0100
To: complaintreviewservice@o2.com, XXXXXXXXXXXX

CC: XXXXXXXXXXX

INC000005926003 - Re O2 Mobile Number 07979 XXXXXX - Promised Customer Callbacks Repeatedly Not Made By O2's CCMT, CRT, And Front Line Adviser Managers With Reference To Repeated Instances Of O2 Data Network Availability At Locations With A Strong Mobile Signal and Good or Excellent Forecast Data Services At Leisure Locations That Attract Large Numbers Of Customers During The Summer Months And/Or On Days With Especially Good Weather. Also Deliberate And Quite Cynical Mis-selling Of The Monthly Cost Of A 36 Month Contract Cost Sold With A New Samsung A54 Handset At O2's Hove Store And Letter Sent By Capita On O2's Behalf Threatening To Terminate My Contract And That O2 Would Refuse To Release My Number To Another Mobile Network Operator Following A Clash With A Member Of Your Call Centre Staff

I am writing to complain in the strongest possible terms firstly about the total contempt repeatedly shown by Virgin Media O2 for customers who dare to complain about your currently quite appallingly overloaded and frequently completely currently unavailable data network at many different locations that have large peaks of customers visiting during the middle of the day during the summer months.

Yesterday, 3rd August I was promised a callback within 24 hours by a front line adviser's manager in respect of the repeated failure of staff on your escalated CCMT network complaint investigation team to contact me within the promised 5 working five days under INC000005926003 first raised on 20th July. When I chased this previously I was told staff on the team had tried to contact me but I had not been available but as with several previous escalations of this issue to to the CRT team such claims are simply untrue and no missed calls are to be found on my O2 mobile phone number from 0800 800 0202 and nor have any messages been left on my voicemail or any email messages sent to me by this team. Also yesterday's promised front line adviser manager callback within 24 hours promised at around 2pm yesterday has also not been made. Also in my first call to 202 yesterday the adviser in the UK with a South Asian type name and accent told me he was putting me through directly to the complaints team in view of my preceding repeated issues with service but over 2 hours later music was still playing on hold on my mobile and the call was not answered while I spoke to further customer service staff on 202 on my landline.

O2, Telefonica and Capita know perfectly well that its data network is overloaded to the point of near or total collapse at many popular summer leisure locations but Capita's call centre staff working on your behalf persistently and repeatedly deliberately deceive customers by making out the fault is with their own handset and will be cured with a Network Reset and if that obfuscation technique does not work it is suggested that sending a new SIM card will fix the problem. But installing the new SIM card or doing the Network Reset never makes any difference at locations such as Gatwick Airport (I regularly take trains from Horsham that wait for three or four minutes at Gatwick Airport before proceeding on to London and I always have no data service available at this heavily over trafficked location) or in busy coastal towns in the summer on nice days such as Brighton, Portsmouth and Bournemouth/Poole that I quite often visit and want to use data in. Also while recently staying at a campsite in Somerset for a week I experienced no data network availability for 5 days in a row at a location where there should be an acceptable 4G data service. This issue was again caused by over contention of data services on the local mast by the number of visitors attending the event that I was participating in.

The standard O2 customer service script in handling all such complaints is always to try and suggest that I was trying to use data at my home address where there generally is internet or data availability and to ignore the fact I am complaining about being unable to access data in a mobile location I am currently visiting. If that fails I am then asked to provide a postcode for my mobile location and when I do not have one I am told the adviser cannot help me. But recently in early July I spoke to an adviser on 202 and told them I did not have the postcode or any data service available to track it down and surely they could GPS locate me via the phone signal. After some time and speaking to a manager they did in fact manage to GPS locate me that way proving that the demands of your customer service staff that customers always provide a postcode for locations that they don't live or work at with no currently working data service are in fact quite unnecessary and simply another apparently dastardly customer service obfuscation technique apparently deliberately used by Capita's call centre staff working for O2 to stop customers lodging location specific lack of data services complaints. I would also note that if I call 202 and say I am calling "About A Technical Problem" and select Option 1 in that menu to say it is about the network I am put in to a call queue where I am never answered for half an hour or often much more. However if at the same menu choice following saying I am calling about a technical problem I select Option 2 for a technical problem other than a network issue I usually reach an adviser in under 2 minutes. This proves to me that O2 or Capita on its behalf is quite deliberately trying to avoid taking calls related to network issues as they then in reality must usually turn out to be about no data or internet service at an address with a strong mobile signal and good forecast available data service. This is because Capita's staff know customers are very frustrated indeed by Virgin Media and/or Telefonica's directors recklessly breaking their own data network through too much data traffic caused by excessively cheap large capacity data plans (a problem it could easily fix overnight by reducing the average data allowance sold to its customers) and so don't want to speak to customers about a problem that they have no capacity to rectify but that the management team of O2 and/or Telefonica in the UK or Madrid most certainly do have.

I think it is utterly shocking that O2 Telefonica has allowed its data network to become overloaded at popular summer leisure locations to an extent where the data network simply shuts off at peak times in the middle of the day when lots of customers are in the footprint of the affected cell tower(s) and that it does nothing to remedy the problem by reducing customer data allowances to a responsible level its network can actually handle at times of peak data demand. It is a also completely outrageous that the combined company's directors in Madrid and the UK decided to also take on the customer database of Virgin Mobile when it knew O2's data network was already on its knees with too much data traffic at many popular summer leisure locations during peak periods. This has only made a bad situation far worse and has greatly increased the instances of data network shutoff due to data request overload.

I also find it completely unacceptable that your highest level of network escalation with the CCMT team has repeatedly simply not called me back about the issue within 5 working days as promised in the text message they sent me under INC000005926003 and simply falsify in their customer notes that they have tried to contact me when they haven't in fact done so. I have also experienced the same issue previously on multiple occasions with your CRT network issue escalation team of them either not calling me at all within 5 days as promised or of their calling and ringing off after two rings so that the called customer cannot manage to answer their phone in time but they can then close out the logged incident without taking any effective remedial action.

Also recently in late May when I had a broken mobile phone and was in a hurry to get another one I visited one of your O2 shops in Hove where your salesman there simply lied to me that a substantial discount on the airtime cost of the contract only applicable for the first 6 months was applicable for the whole 36 month contract. I even checked with EE and Vodafone shops in the same road as your store if they could match this contract cost of just over £12 a month for 36 months including a 150Gb data allowance and new Samsung A54 phone and they assured me they could not due to the high cost of the Samsung A54 handset. They urged me to check the contract cost I was promised in writing but the till receipt from your store only showed the per month costs of the data plan for the first 6 months and did not show that it increased very substantially from months 7 to 36. Then when I decided to return the phone under the 14 day cooling off period staff in your head office returns call centre speaking to the store staff tried to suggest that my returning to the store on a Monday two weeks on from the Monday I had taken the new contract out on was Day 15 and so I could not cancel the contract. However even staff in your Hove store were shocked by this tactic and after some debate with your sales support call centre, including the fact that I had been deliberately misled about the terms of the 36 month contract, it was allowed to be cancelled and the handset returned.

I would like your O2 Complaint Review Service to investigate fully why I have not received the call from your CCMT team promised on 20th July under INC000005926003 and in particular why staff on your CCMT team and CRT network teams are repeatedly able to get away with pretending that they have phoned a customer and that he/she was not available when they have not called at all or they have called once for only two rings and then hung up before the customer can answer. I would also like an investigation of why O2's data services repeatedly shut down and are unavailable to customers at the most busy times of day at locations like Gatwick Airport, Brighton, Portsmouth and Poole/Bournemouth that experience much increased traffic over the summer months. I would also like an investigation of why staff on the CRT and CCMT teams at O2 either make no call to the customer at all within the promised five working days in the text message they send to customers or only make one call that they hang up on after two rings when I believe your internal operating procedures say they should try to make at least three separate phone calls to the customer some time and/or days apart. This never happens and they either never call at all or only call once and hang up after just two rings.

Also I would like an investigation of why Capita on O2's behalf (the envelope the letter was sent in had Capita's name and address on the back) was allowed to send me a letter about a clash on the phone with one of your more unhelpful members of call centre staff (I have spoken to many other members of staff in your call centres who are helpful and respect customers who I do not clash with at all) in which it threatened not only to immediately cancel the contract I had just taken out (if there was another serious clash of personality with one of your staff members that you deem as being abusive) and force me to pay off the full remaining 36 month contract and/or any further handset cost beyond that but also threatened that my mobile number would be ceased on your network and that I would not be able to port it elsewhere to another mobile network. Such a threat clearly contravenes Ofcom's contract termination and/or number porting rules and regardless of my dispute with your network or its staff there is no basis on which you are allowed to prevent the porting out of my number to another network.

I have been with your network for a large number of years both directly and also via GiffGaff and Tesco Mobile MVNO networks and I would therefore be grateful for a full and thorough investigation of all the points raised above including the recent repeated failure of your CCMT team to make contact with me in respect of network data overload issues as well as in relation to the misselling of a 36 month contract on the Samsung A54 handset that took place by your adviser Regan in your Hove store as well as the letter I received from Capita after the clash with a member of your call centre staff threatening that if there was a repeated instance of seriously clashing with a member of your staff during a customer service phone call my mobile number would be permanently closed down and I would be unable to port it out to another network.

I look forward to hearing from you in respect of all of all of the above issues.

[Enlli]

@Capvermell Well there is nobody from O2 here who is going to read your lengthy tome, and nobody here who could do anything about any of this.

Me.. O2 works most of the time for my needs, in the rare cases it doesn't I swap which SIM I use for data. An advantage of dual SIM

[Capvermell]

@Enlli It is surely nonsense to say that there is nobody from O2 here as quite clearly posting in threads on this official O2 website hosted so called Community forum (its on their website whether they choose to provide any official responses from their own and/or Capita's employees or not) brings these issues to greater attention within the O2 management hierarchy.  And if you Google for "o2 data network overloaded unavailable" you will find this thread is the number 1 hit in the Google search results.

However given how appalling is the state of data availability of O2's 3.5G H+ transmitters that cover vast tracts of the countryside between towns containing many villages I find it hard to believe that you are not affected by this problem at all although it does seem that if people mainly travel by car that they don't try using data much when mobile between towns and largely only use O2 for phone calls and texts so consequently don't experience the no current data or internet access problem nearly as much.  And for phone calls and texts the O2 network on the whole still just about functions in most places (albeit that calls disconnect at times without warning periodically due to local mast overload) but for data O2 lets customers down for hours at a time on a regular basis in many locations that become full of customers on sunny summer days.

As to using other networks and/or a SIM on more than one network in my phone I am looking at that but as the reports of organisations like https://rootmetrics.com/en-GB/home seem to care only about raw network speed in speedtests but do not seem to ever monitor the occasions when data networks become unavailable completely (a very commonplace problem on the O2 network in places that get busy with leisure visitors in the summer) it is very hard to be sure in advance what other UK mobile network will be that much better than O2.  But in general the mobile data networks in the UK seem to be far more over trafficked and in a far worse state than in many other European countries, largely because the UK regulator Ofcom does nothing to discourage unlimited data plans or high capacity data plans that cause them to get in to this state due to customers trying to do far more mobile video streaming than they are actually built to handle.

My impression is that all the UK mobile networks currently experience problems with data overload on sunny summer days in locations where people are out and about and using a lot of mobile data but that O2 is merely the worst of these while EE is the least bad overall but unfortunately EE is by far the worst network of all for mobile coverage at my home address in southern Surrey.

What I find most frustrating is that there is no means for a customer affected by these problems to have any conversations with O2 engineering staff to discuss the technical basis of what is going on with periods of data unavailability and what O2 is doing in terms of future network development to try to improve the situation. While O2 claims it is improving its network all the time it still isn't committed to switching off and replacing its many 3G or especially its geographically extensive range of H+ 3.5G cells with a better range of 4G coverage as other networks are this year and nor does it publish any information on either its plans to or its recent actions in upgrading the mobile data technology used by its individual mobile phone masts.  But certainly my local home mast does not seem to have been upgraded at all for many years and is now a very badly over trafficked 4G cell (with speed test results at my home address of 1Mbps to 2Mbps in the morning and evening peaks at my home address with a 3 bar signal) and there is no sign of O2 providing 5G service anywhere on the Surrey West Sussex border including not even at Gatwick Airport (7 miles to the East of my home) where it most badly needs to make such an upgrade.  Although O2's coverage maps try to suggest it has some outdoor 5G coverage at Gatwick my experience is that in practice no such coverage exists on the ground.

And if O2 isn't prioritising Gatwick AIrport for blanket 5G coverage then where exactly outside London is it prioritising for deployment of 5G data services?

[pgn]

If you want O2 to consider your points, @Capvermell - the 3 x Social Media platforms they monitor are in the link below this post, and formal complaints can go as described here: https://www.o2.co.uk/how-to-complain - a route you have already explored, it seems.

Only others who come here to look for an answer they cannot get from O2 CS telephone or online webchat support will see your posts, normally.

So it goes.

[Capvermell]

@pgn

I previously took my issues about O2's data network shutting off and becoming unavailable in the middle of the day at locations that are busy with customers on sunny summer days to the Communications Ombudsman in the Autumn of last year.

But O2 just responded quoting paragraph 2.2 of their terms and conditions saying that service wasn't guaranteed everywhere all the time and the Communications Ombudsman just accepted that despite the fact that blatantly O2's network is heavily overloaded for data access in many locations and the recent addition of Virgin Mobile's customers to its network has only succeeded in making that situation far worse than it was before.

I can try posting on O2's social media platforms but judging from the fact that I haven't had any response from any of the company's senior management to my email of yesterday to their complaints review service that I copied them in on I expect that they will all simply retreat in to their various respective corporate silos and continue pretending that O2 has a wonderful modern data network.

But on checking at www.signalchecker.co.uk for postcode RH6 0NP fact is that O2 is also the only network not providing a 5G service at Gatwick Airport.  Although if they were providing one I expect it would be faked 5G only running at 4G speeds like it is in much of Central London rather than a real 5G mast with proper backhaul capable of a 300Mbps speed test that I occasionally come across here and there.  Although I notice that on my recent trip to Finland their 5G masts could provide speed test results of up to 500Mbps using precisely the same mobile phone..............

Also I'm quite sure that O2 do have a team of staff who monitor posts in this forum but it simply suits them politically to not be under any duty to respond to those posts and to brand it as a self help customer forum despite it being located on their own UK corporate website...........

[madasaf1sh]

@Capvermell 

You do talk rubbish...

O2 can decide to provide service where they want and to what speed and technology, if they decide not to provide it at Gatwick (its an awful airport). that is there choice, they provide 5G at Heathrow and Manchester Airports.. 

I get 5G in most places I visit up here in Yorkshire and down as far as Peterborough, Central London,and Watford...  

You have used a website that uses API's to check a network's coverage maps... so is not based on live data from the likes of cellmapper or opensignal.

If the Ombudsman has ruled against you then nothing you can do will change that..

There are no o2 staff on here anymore, and as you can whinge and whine as much as you want  they wont just magically appear.. 

Go somewhere else on holiday?? or just move networks, full information on how to cancel is here Guide: Cancelling Your Contract  I am sure EE, Voda or 3 would be more than welcome to have your customer..