So... here was my experience with porting my number in, plus more.
1. A major ordeal going through the porting process and very nearly lost the number I've had for 20 years. If it wasn't for the contacts I had within the company I recently left behind (that gave me a business line for my role) I would have lost the number as the PAC code had expired, much to my surprise when my partner started receiving calls on her phone for me from family (fortunately not my new employer). No contact from O2 and the investigation was driven by me - basically get a new PAC or sorry and goodbye! (Getting the PAC is not a straightforward process to this where I came from).
2. One or two individuals I dealt with to get assistance to resolve this sought to place theblame in my direction, when I'm simply the end user/paying customer - all I needed to do was provide the PAC code in the form, along with my personal information to get everything up and running. It was inferred that I must have done something wrong when I completed the online form.
3. It took four days (and lots of calls) for this to be fixed. As you can imagine, I was quite upset about this and the whole debacle, and requested that my contract be cancelled (I was still within the cooking off period). The individual(s) that I dealt with from the 'front desk' didn't fill me with confidence, and as a result of my prior cancellation request caused some complications when I later agreed to a 50% discount for the duration of the contract - it was never about the money (the number was priceless to me for personal reasons) but I accepted the offer as the escalation engineer worked hard to help restore service.
4. Sadly, I'm now regretting my decision to stay with O2 (again), despite the discount, as there has been a broken mast which covers my home area for at least 2 weeks. There have been no meaningful updates whatsoever, and I've just started a new job (I work from home often) and so it has been quite embarrasing/stressful not being able to have consistently reliable service to conduct my daily business without continually having problems.
I have worked in technology for over 20 years, and I have never experienced such poor service. I appreciate that these things could be viewed as isolated incidents, but judging by some of the posts I've read on the boards here and my own experience, I'm setting a very low bar in terms of my expectations going forward.
Here's hoping that things will improve very soon!
