"All The Data You Need in Europe” - Yeah Right! (O2Travel)

[Anonymous]

OK, I am new to O2 and I have been pretty happy, that is until now.

As I travel abroad a lot, O2 Travel was one of the main reasons for me going with O2. What a mistake that now seems to be.

I fully understand the need to throttle bandwidth, but the throttling is so aggressive that I cannot even load 19 out of 20 webpages. I have read that the throttling limits your speed to 15Kbps. However, it is taking as long as 10 minutes to load a single webpage, including BBC mobile website pages.

Selling this as a service where you can use “All The Data You Need in Europe” is very, very misleading. As it stands, the service is totally unusable, even for the most basic tasks once throttling has kicked in.

In case anyone is wondering, I have tried both roaming partner networks where I am in Spain and both are the same. Other users in the same room on these networks are getting 18Mbps and 16Mbps respectively. Before the throttling kicks in, the service is very fast.

This is wrong to offer “All The Data You Need in Europe” and yet cripple the service to the point where it is for all intents and purposes very much a data limit.

[jonsie]

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@Cleoriff wrote:

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@jonsie wrote:

Many people giving you advice have never been overseas. I know the problems and the way to get round them....

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As you know @jonsie  I am not one of 'those people'. Fortunately for me I took the advice of yourself, MI5 and Bambino. My bills when I go abroad now are not much higher than when at home

I found my eureka moment with Wifi...and all the other apps that can be used...

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We are all here to help, some can help from experience @Cleoriff  and I count you amongst those.....

[Cleoriff]

[Toby]

Hi MH100,

Sorry to hear you're not happy about this!

I will pass on your thoughts and this thread to the team. Insights from everyone here on the community are always helpful.

Feel free to post any other views you have.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for all of the helpful replies everyone.

To be honest, the last few years when I was with Vodafone, I always had a Vodafone local SIM from the country I had been visiting, in this case Spain.

Whislt it works, it does mean that I have to either carry two phones, or forgoe having my UK mobile number on whilst travelling (this is so inconvenient).

O2 Travel just seemed so compelling, which is a main reason for my switch. The reality is very different, unfortunately.

I will of course report back.

[Cleoriff]

Hi @Anonymous 

I also travel to Spain every 6-8 weeks. Initially I had two phones one with O2 sim and the other with Movistar...and at the time it worked well. Now I just use my UK phone, currently a galaxy S3 and I have no problems really...

Have you ever considered a dual sim phone? I know little about these but @MI5  also travels a lot and I think he uses one......

[MI5]

Yes I do Cleoriff and I use a Magic sim adapter so that I can get 3g on both sim cards, however, my EE sim was playing up this week in Germany and not giving me very good roaming speeds so it's not just O2 that can suffer this inconvenience 😞

[Anonymous]

OK, I had a call from O2's complaints department this morning. The lady I spoke with was very professional and understanding. However, no real solutions, although she did promise to alert bosses to the issue.

She said that I can't have my iPhone 6 unlocked. I will have to wait until O2 allows this, or pay off my device plan.

I did ask for a refund of the £8 I spend on O2 Travel, which she agreed to.

I just reiterated that I think O2 need to either change their advertising, as it is misleading, or reduce the level of throttling, so that you can at least browse the web.