When the o2 shops opened on the high street they had queues outside, it was controlled there wasn't a bundle of people stuck in the doorway. Use the same idea for the website, if the demand was kept lower none of the sessions fail, everyone who starts the process can finish or timeout within a short period. To keep it first come first served anyone who visits the website during a period of high demand would be allowed to create an account or login if they have an existing account but not go any further. Then use a process like ticketmasters website to queue everyone.

The shop activation problem is an odd one, the activation system has a known amount of possible concurrent users (no of shops * no of activation terminals), on the launch day there was only going to be that number of users. Then the only backup system they use is paper, its not suprising that it takes 5 days to enter all the data and activate everyone. A failover system that just gathers data and doesn't process could have been in place.

When the o2 shops opened on the high street they had queues outside, it was controlled there wasn't a bundle of people stuck in the doorway. Use the same idea for the website, if the demand was kept lower none of the sessions fail, everyone who starts the process can finish or timeout within a short period. To keep it first come first served anyone who visits the website during a period of high demand would be allowed to create an account or login if they have an existing account but not go any further. Then use a process like ticketmasters website to queue everyone.

The shop activation problem is an odd one, the activation system has a known amount of possible concurrent users (no of shops * no of activation terminals), on the launch day there was only going to be that number of users. Then the only backup system they use is paper, its not suprising that it takes 5 days to enter all the data and activate everyone. A failover system that just gathers data and doesn't process could have been in place.

When the o2 shops opened on the high street they had queues outside, it was controlled there wasn't a bundle of people stuck in the doorway. Use the same idea for the website, if the demand was kept lower none of the sessions fail, everyone who starts the process can finish or timeout within a short period. To keep it first come first served anyone who visits the website during a period of high demand would be allowed to create an account or login if they have an existing account but not go any further. Then use a process like ticketmasters website to queue everyone.

The shop activation problem is an odd one, the activation system has a known amount of possible concurrent users (no of shops * no of activation terminals), on the launch day there was only going to be that number of users. Then the only backup system they use is paper, its not suprising that it takes 5 days to enter all the data and activate everyone. A failover system that just gathers data and doesn't process could have been in place.

I feel a blog post coming on myself…

Reading all the chats and websites etc, it is constantly pointed out that the iPhone is a small seller in a big market. While all of this is going on, O2 is still competently running a really, really big engineering and customer service operation. It is fun to think that powmobs, because they are high value customers (min