So a few months ago I joined O2 to take advantage of the free EU roaming and also the Virgin Media free upgrade. I'm paying £10 a month for 30GB of data, which is now double to 60GB thanks to the Volt deal. While I am pretty happy with the price and the amount of data I am getting, I am not at all happy with the data speeds I am getting, at all! It's basically unusable.
I recently took a visit to North Wales and visited many different towns over a 3 days weekend but the internet was pretty much completely unusable. Despite having full 4G signal in most places, some speed tests were completely failing, eventually got some speed tests work and got between 0.01 Mbps and 0.8 Mbps down.
In Liverpool, standing outside central station, a speed test was 0.06 Mbps down on full 4G signal. Outside M&S arena, on half 4G signal, speed tests completely fail. I tried for an hour, couldn't get on the internet at all. Even throughout the city where there was 5G, the speed tests didn't really get any better than 5 Mbps.
In Manchester, standing in St Peters Square, again on full signal, speed test are typically under 1 Mbps down. Moving around the city the speed tests can improve to 10 Mbps, but for 4G in 2022 even that's very poor.
In Warrington, again the best download was 3.3 Mbps, with an upload of 0.16 Mbps upload.
The train line between Liverpool and Manchester, while there is always coverage, the internet is completely unusable for most of the journey.
I was almost starting to believe my phone was broken, but having taken two trips to Europe since joining O2, I don't believe it is. Having spent a time in four European countries, I haven't seen a speed test less than 64 Mbps, with speeds up to 155 Mbps
So why is O2 so terrible in the UK?
