Leaving O2 today

[Tony1044]

So after having been with O2 for just short of 4 years now, my migration to Zen should take place today.

Been getting ever more frustrated with O2 - when it works, it's great but from 10pm, as an example, last night I got 67 BYTES/sec download speeds...

Plus the single static IP address has become too limiting.

Zen are considerably more expensive but they're a 'proper' business provider and everyone I speak to who's used them cannot recommend them enough (short of being expensive, of course).

I'll still dip in and out of the forums here of course, even though they seem to have gone very quiet over the last 12 months or so.

[Saturday]

Hi Tony

I've had no issues personally but I get the feeling that O2BB has lost its "edge" and isn't the great deal and experience it used to be.

Yes, the forum is very quiet - don't know if that's a sign that it's not needed or that we aren't providing what people want. Looking at the other O2 forums, even the official one, they're not all that busy either.

Let us know how you get on and thanks for your valuable contribution over the years.

[Tony1044]

Hi Saturday,

Thanks for the kind words.

To be honest, the single static IP address was more of an issue than the stability - I could live with it dropping after 10pm but it was becoming more frequent.

The move to Zen went through today and so far it seems to ok - it's in the testing phase but seems a bit slow at the moment - we'll see.

Personally, I think that O2 have generally provided such a generally good service that there's been no major need for community help.

Still glad this forum's here though - I like to keep dropping in and checking out what's happening and I like the news feeds

Plus I genuinely believe that some of the nicest, most helpful and technically competent guys online run this site - it's made me a bit lazy in some ways, because I haven't had to learn the intricacies of ADSL because there's top blokes to ask

[stu_uk]

Goodluck with the move Tony hope all goes well with the DLM gods

[Medicuk]

I'd be going with you but Sky LLU is full at the Poplar exchange, good luck.

[Tony1044]

Thanks guys.

The move went through last week and so far it seems to be going well.

Haven't really noticed any drop or improvement in performance yet but considering it's still in the first week, I guess that's not too bad.

I'll keep you all posted on how it is going.

[NewsreadeR]

I leave on 7th, going back to Sky, seems as o2 decided to put my package upto £14.50 per month, as I don't have an o2 phone.

They did offer me a fiver a month off, but I had to commit to another 12 months contract. Seems as I am still waiting for my replacement router from yonks ago, they can stuff it.

I will be £2 a month better off, and have a truly unlimited BB and also the ability to use Sky Anytime + as from next Wednesday.

[Tony1044]

How did the move go Newsreader?

Man has mine been an issue...during the training period it was unstable.

Since that ended, it's been utterly unusable.

My download speeds are sub 1k...literally in the bytes.

Despite being almost rock solid with O2 for so many years, Zen were adamant I had to jumpt through their testing loops. Again, and again and again.

I've had to swap cables and filters. Plug only into the master socket and even changed the router - twice.

If I run a set of persistent pings: one to bbc.co.uk, one to google.com and one internally to the router, I see c30ms to both bbc ang google with around 1 in 10 dropped as no response. To the internal router sub 1ms with maybe 1 in 1000 dropped and maybe 1 in 100 up to around 5ms.

Whenever I speak to their "helpdesk" I get the same responses: Can you just ping our gateway from the router (yes. and yes the responses are generally good). And...well and that's it. There is an utter reluctance to help beyond that.

All of this, notwithstanding that the routers were never connecting at anything better than 2700 (down from the 3400-3900 with O2).

And it falls on totally deaf ears...they want to go through the same loops every. single. time.

Oh and to put off any possible doubt, I've also tried:

Shutting down all the internal equipment. That means all my servers such as my Exchange server(!).

Nothing plugged into the router.

Nothing plugged into the router except one device which at various times have been the following (note - the pings and downloads are consistent across): Windows 2008 R2, VMware ESXi [Linux], Mac OS X Snow Leopard [Macbook Air], Windows 7 [Enterprise 32bit and Ultimate 64bit] and Linux [Ubuntu desktop 10.04 32bit and Server 11.04 64bit)*.

Oh and all of the above have been connected via both wifi AND cable. AND to be sure - new cable (in new routers, remember) and different ports on the router.

I've reconfigured the first router to use WEP and the newest to use WEP/WPA PSK and WPA EAS.

Oh and of course, because of new equipment, I've used two new cables between socket and router AND three new (ok - one sealed but a couple of years old and one brand new) ADSL filter.

There are no extensions (notwithstanding it's been in the test socket for over a week).

I am supposedly going to have another manager call me this evening but as things stand, I'm looking to move away from them to maybe Be Pro who do multiple static IP's as well as unlimited.

Award winning ISP? Not seen a single sign of it yet.

My systems are still down. My email is queuing at my MX backup provider. My personal and business websites are down. Ok - to be fair, the websites aren't really important and I'd never run a mail server without some kind of resilience/backup but three weeks after the move and I've to all intents and purposes been broadband-free for the entire time.

<sigh>

And this is how they treat their "Business Pro" customers? I shudder to think how they cr@p on domestic accounts when things aren't right.

*I'm not some weird collector of computer systems - I work in IT and the majority of the above is virtualised. By the way (I realise this is meaningless for the majority, but some few might find this useful) take a look at Citrix XenClient if you want a bare metal client hypervisor (virtualise on a desktop/laptop).

[Saturday]

Good grief - what a disaster.

Hope you can get things sorted with Zen though personally, I think I'd probably cut my losses and go elsewhere.

Just shows what a lottery ADSL provision can be.

[Tony1044]

I'd do that today unfortunately I'm on a site that doesn't allow mobile phones to be brought on.

Luckily I have a company-supplied laptop, so I can at least get online.

And they wonder why I am losing patience with their support.

Which, on the face of it appears to consist of pinging the router and pinging their gateway from the router...