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o2’s joint mobile and home broadband service – wicked!

This is rather neat. In fact if I’d known about this a few days ago, I’d have held off going and buying the bog-standard BT Broadband for my new place.

O2 have launched a service combining both home broadband and mobile broadband. That makes a lot of sense to me. It’s a wickedly good deal.

Here’s the concept for the 18 month arrangement:

– You get your 8MB unlimited home broadband free for 12 months (after which you need to pay at least 7.50 per month).
– You get a free USB modem dongle — this is for your laptop when you’re out and about
– You get a free WiFi modem/router with automatic configuration — that’s for the home
– You get unlimited The Cloud wifi internet access when you’re out and about. (This I pay £12 quid a month for on it’s own, so this is a good inclusion.)
– Your home broadband is 8mb, unlimited fair-use downloads. No charges or anything like that.
– No connection fees or setup charges.

Total cost?

Wait for it.

20 quid a month. Right on! Or, you can get it all for £99.99 up front on a rolling 1-month contract.

That’s a deal and a half.

The joint offer is available for customers signing up to O2 Mobile Broadband between 1 August and 31 October 2008 who live within the O2 Home Broadband network – approximately 60% of the UK population. Customers wanting to upgrade to a higher speed package or not covered by O2’s broadband network will receive a £7.50 per month discount on their chosen plan for 12 months.

Both existing O2 Mobile and Home Broadband customers can also take advantage of this offer.

Let’s hear from Sally Cowdry, o2 Marketing Director:
“Whether our customers are watching a video or playing a game online at home, or browsing the internet on their laptop while on the move, our combined Broadband package is the perfect combination to help them stay connected wherever they are.”

This should be ready to purchase from the 4th of August next week.

If you were thinking of buying a tenner-a-month dongle from 3, this o2 deal (potentially, depending on your requirements), blows it out the water. Annoyingly I’m already paying BT £30 a month for broadband and £12 a month to The Cloud — and I haven’t yet included the mobile broadband charges I’m paying as well.. I’m already paying double. Joy!

More information here: www.o2.co.uk/broadband.

22 COMMENTS

  1. This o2 service has been available in Germany for quite a while – I've been thinking about this, too (my main mobile operator is o2 anyways). But, then, I heard from some people – one beeing my direct neighbor – that the “home broadband part” wasn't all too good in terms of stability and transfer rates. So, I will observe this a bit longer…

  2. It sounds great, but I can't help that oft-proven adage “you get what you pay for” popping into my head. And I'm far from sure I'd want to put all those eggs into O2's basket, given their track record and the hassles people have had with similar 'too-good-to-be-true' offerings from others…

    Still, it could be one to sit back and watch (til at least mid-October, perhaps!).

  3. As you may have noticed, I'm not O2's biggest fan, but the ADSL part of the connection is provided by Be Unlimited who are absolutely fantastic 🙂

  4. Tried it and hated it at the beginning.
    Installation is not idiot-proof or Nacho-proof and the modem/router does not have enough power for our home wifi operation (3 laptops and two smartphones connected more or less regularly at the same time)
    Customer service is good though, and available 24/7 when the first router didn't work, they replaced it within 24 hours.
    We're using it now anyway and it got better, speed is so much better that any provider we've had before but coverage of our small flat is not uniform. I have yet to enjoy all the other benefits

  5. Oh, okay. My fears are somewhat soothed! As I'm in the market for a new provider I may take a look. Although I'm not in the 60% coverage that get the cheapest deal. Doh!

  6. I switched from virgin to O2 a few months back and they are fine. Very stable connection. Good download speeds not far off the advertised 8mb. Excellent customer service – 24 hours on an 0800 number and very helpful. They force you to use their mail server though unless you pay an extra

  7. Whatever way you look at it, the basic O2 broadband package is wicked value even at 12.50. Since my wife has an O2 phone I only pay 7.50. What’s great as well is freephone tech support, and the fact that even “level 1” know a lot about adsl ie pretty technical. I just hope this continues.

    This deal just makes things better!

    Unfortunately I couldn’t find the detail on the O2 site for this combined offer. I could see £20pcm for the 3Gb broadband, which alone is *not* competitive. Three only want ~7.50 for me as current subscribe for 5Gb.

  8. Quick reply to AJ who said “They force you to use their mail server though unless you pay an extra £5 per month for a static IP.” — not so. I’m happily using gmail via smtp/imap without any problem. I suspect it’s because they use non-standard ports. Previously I used 1&1, and they too offered non-standard ports.

    Works great at work too, where outbound smtp on the default port is similarly restricted 😉

  9. Quick reply to MarkW who said “It sounds great,” .

    I’ve been an ADSL user since 2000 & have worked in telecoms. the O2 service is *superb*. of course in the early days so were Tiscali and then bulldog. In each case the tech support teams were small and highly knowledgeable/helpful. The challenge is whether they can sustain that as they grow. I really hope so as right now they seem to be the best of the big names.

    I can’t say the same about mobile, where they seem somewhat laggard in the data area when compared to say 3 who since introducing Xseries moved from nowhere to #1 in no time.

  10. Quick reply to “nacho” who said about the router “does not have enough power for our home wifi operation”

    I’d agree with you on that. I got a 780WL from them, and am convinced the wireless tx level is limited below std. It’s fairly poor, and I’ve ended up using an external (FON) router running dd-wrt.

    The router itself is locked to O2 firmware, but VoIP can be enabled. It is based on the Broadcom BCM6348 chip which is a great match for the O2 DSLAMs and works very well. It also have QOS built in to the router. Compared to a zycel and netgear dg834gt I own it is significantly superior in stability on my dodgy ~63dB 5km line.

    Oh it’s real ugly though ;-(

  11. Very cool – moving end of September and had been looking at O2 as a new broadband provider – I think this clinches the deal.

  12. AJ – I use Be (the same provide, just not bundled by O2) and you are free to use any mail server you like – I use a good number of IMAP and SMTP servers. I believe this is the same as for O2. Static IP is only useful for hosting your own server.

  13. Rather than email server, I meant smtp server.

    Check out the following link which explains the issue (ignore the bit about skype though because this is no longer the case):

    http://www.intomobile.com/2008/01/27/o2-broadba

    For some weird reason they tie the get-out with a static IP which is obviously a completely different issue.

    It still worked out cheaper than my previous broadband package and the service is much better. Virgin told me the best speed I would ever be able to get was 1mb but I get around 6mb with O2.

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