O2 drop out of the mobile broadband market by considerably downgrading the mobile broadband packages offered. The industry standard is 500Mb/day@£2 and £3Gb/month@£15. As you can see from the chart above from their website, o2 now only offers a paltry 200Mb/day and a meagre 2Gb for £15 - a whole Gb less than Three or Vodafone - who’s 3Gb is hardly generous to start with. The ‘free wireless’ is largely meaningless. Most places one can use this - such as McDonald’s - offer free wireless anyway via The Cloud upon registration. Also, it’s near impossible to set up (in-store you are met with blank faces); the ‘free wireless’ is only available via o2’s own software (which takes over your wireless connection thank you very much) it doesn’t work with a Mac and woe betide you if you want to use it on a different machine to that which you registered it on.
So-so connection speeds and very frequent random connection drop-outs for no apparent reason are also another reason to give o2 a very wide berth. o2 clearly don’t want to compete in this market and are dropping out by default.
