You Can Call Me Al

Just conducted a little experiment with o2. There's plenty of "loyalty" features on their website but they really don't seem to know the meaning of the word.

My 12 month contract ended in October 2006, but the upgrade I wanted wasn't out until January so I just kept a rolling contract until it was released. January came and the phone release date was put back a week or two, so I phoned back and again it was put back. It eventually appeared on their website, so I phoned up straight away for my upgrade, just to hear it had been put back again. This went on for another few weeks, I'd phone weekly, they'd say it had been put back to the following week.

So I thought I'd try something... I called o2 Tuesday morning as a new customer and asked for the XDA Graphite (the phone I had been after), just over 24 hours later it was in my hands. So much for being a loyal customer spending £££'s on line rental and calls over the years.

Worst part is the Graphite isn't all I'd thought it'd be, it's nice, it's light and fast (runs skype over WiFi great) but it just feels like a step backwards from having full-blown Windows Mobile. So it's going back as part of the "14 day cool-off period" and I'll just stick with my XDA Mini S until something better (Windows Mobile 6) comes along and I can leave o2 altogether.

Now I understand why Be* have a little asterix in their logo. It must be to point out their advertised 24Meg broadband is a bit of a sham. I know I was never going to get 24Meg unless I lived in the exchange but my activation date was today and I have a massive 3Meg. Yes. Three. 3.5 if I'm lucky.

I gave the support number a quick call to see if there's anything obvious I'm doing wrong and it seems they have "profiles" that they can change at their end. They moved me up to the highest speed profile. No change to the downstream but got an extra 200Kb on the upstream (up to 1.2Meg, very handy for those flickr uploads)

Saying that though, I've always known my location has been a bit pants for ADSL, with ADSLv1 I could only get about 1Meg, and now I have 3 times as much. Suppose I should be happy. Just annoying when you see other people on the forum with like 17

One last note for the numptys, a quick lesson in connection speeds:

Often I hear "Well, you never get 1Meg anyway, I only get about 120K when downloading!" (even heard an IT lecturer say something along those lines). Broadband is measured in Megabits per second (Mbps notice the lowercase b) which makes it sound lovely in the ads. Although browers usually show you in KiloBytes per second (KBps - notice the uppercase B). So... say you have "1Meg" broadband. So that'll be 1024Kbps - there's 8 bits in a byte - so divide that by 8 and you get 128KBps so getting 120KBps, Mr 1Meg, is pretty close to maxing out!

Rant over.