O2 failings: unreliable coverage; requires pressure to abide by Sale of Goods Act

[Anonymous]

25 July 2017. North Hertfordshire. Sandon.
Over past two weeks mobile service has got worse at my location (inside and outside property). Delayed reception of texts, banked-up emails; no internet connection at all; sometimes no register recognition to allow me to ring 202 on mobile to report fault.

A call to O2 elicited this sequence: Your phone's sim card could be at fault; for better connection switch phone off and on again; "no it's not your phone the local mast is having issues"; the mast will be functioning again by 21 July; (did get revived internet use for about two days, then outage again). I was awarded £7 in compensation for days offline and up to 21/7.

I tested lots of locations around my home and found what might be called a "blind spot" for transmission there and a few hundred metres around it. That is, very fast internet connections (even in a dip shaded by dense tree cover) elsewhere in the village but not on my "trajectory" (and tested at different times).

My call today to O2 (25/7) had this response: switch your phone to just use 2G (after a previous O2 call promised "you will have 4G by the year-end"); oh, the mast is 4km away (as if it had just got up and walked further off); we could release you from the contract and you can find another provider.

I said I was not going away and that O2 should visit this area and its mast and ascertain the faults. Insistence brought a manager to the phone who simply relayed the original call-taker's platitudes. I said that for the sake of others affected, too, I wasn't going away and wanted technical answers. You cannot ring the technical department directly but have to be transferred - by which time, after half an hour speaking or more usually left on hold, I had run out of time to continue the call.

But I shall persist another day. And I will get a technical assessment.

[madasaf1sh]

Not being funny, but i have just checked both the o2 coverage checker and a 3rd party site called opensignal.com both show poor to non existant 4G coverage.

This is based on the postcode s9 0qs

o2 -Coverage Map

Good outdoors. Patchy indoors. Not good for mobile broadband.
Patchy outdoors. Patchy indoors. Not good for mobile broadband.

(Looks like planning permission was submitted for a mast in Sandon, but looks like it got objected too, so never built out... )

Opensignal just is a sea of red across all networks...

Even BT shows slow speed for ADSL of upto 10Mbps.

[MI5]

The important aspect here is the opening statement to the first post.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for coverage check. Yes usually on the "poor" side, but I have had connections in the past - so this is a different scenario. Now, even within this poorly covered geo area, there are intermittent blind spots with no coverage. So I am not fighting for a hopeless cause (I hope!) merely for what I had before.

[madasaf1sh]

I have a feeling its a mast at a farm thats failed (possibly cumberlow green farm) as that is the closest CTIL (o2+VF) mast to you, all the other are the other side of the A505

Although strangely enought their is an Emergency Services Network mast close by...

[MI5]

How come o2 can't figure that out or check it out then?

[Beenherebefore]

---

@MI5 wrote:

How come o2 can't figure that out or check it out then?

---

I can't believe you have asked that.........too much French sun and Merlot ?

[Anonymous]

Latest today is - engineers are due to contact me on 5 August.

I suspect the local mast technology is the issue. But you get nowhere prompting that that's where they might investigate. Obviously, like most, they make you jump through many hoops before staring to consider the fault could lie at their door.

An O2 person who left a voicemail for me 31 July not only enacted some separate fantasy play with me being a character who was "just having some text problems" - but suggested that problems like that would happen if I was texting landlines! TEXTING LANDLINES

Please!

Getting to this point has taken several calls to O2 (some very long), handset/coverage tests by O2 "gurus" (which were then ignored), endless repeated explanations fom me, and finally today confirmation about the engineers - which I would not have known about had I not phoned again.

A promise has also been made to send out a new sim card - in case, the secondary data problem is connected with that. Because, my phone (unchanged in its apps since early spring here) is showing double the usual data usage - at a time when I had no internet access and hardly used wifi while on the move! All data was "used up" within the first 9 days of the bill span - covering the constant outage during the period....

I am willing to concede any tech glitch my end over the data issue. But the 2 problems have occurred at the same time - so I do wonder.

[Anonymous]

I have been bunged some "free data" apparently following the call today.

[MI5]

Is that free data that you can't use?

[Anonymous]

O2's own consumer website has message for my area - "Sorry we're currently working on a phone mast in this area".

I have no idea how long that message has been there. No one at O2 alerted me to it.