O2 Broadband

From the 1st of March onwards O2 mobile phone and mobile broadband customers can earn £50 if they sign up for O2 Home Broadband. Punters who opt for either the Premium or Pro packages, both of which provide top speeds of 20Mbps, will see £50 credit tacked onto their mobile bills.

This offer applies to mobile phone and mobile broadband subscribers on pay monthly and pay as you go. This could pay for five months of mobile broadband if you’re on the 18 month 1GB plan, or two months on the least expensive 24 month iPhone 3GS tariff.

If customers are not already with O2 mobile they can still take advantage of the offer and simply buy a mobile product within 30 days of purchasing O2 Premium or Pro Broadband. This also applies to the SIM-Onle (pay as you go) tariffs.

O2 mobile customers can sign up for O2 Premium costs £10 a month, or O2 Pro for £17.50. Premium and Pro both provide speeds of up to 20Mbps and unlimited downloads. The only difference is that the Pro package allows for faster upload speeds - up to 2.5 Mbps compared to the 1.3Mbps maximum upload of Premium.

O2 is celebrating after achieving poll position in an independent study by SIRODA, which shows the blue broadband and mobile network offering the fastest mobile broadband speeds in the country.

SIRODA completed a comprehensive survey of all 5 mobile broadband providers in the UK over a 60 day period, measuring each connection speed at peak periods throughout the day.

O2 proved to be over 30% quicker than the slowest mobile broadband provider for web page access during tests in January 2010 and on average had the fastest download rate in 12 of the 20 UK key cities tested.

O2 mobile broadband prices start at just £2 per day (500MB, Unlimited Wi-Fi). Click here for more info.

There are only 2 days left to take advantage of O2’s two months free broadband offer; that is a saving of up to £45!

The offer is available on all 12 month contract packages, Standard, Premium and Pro. O2 packages all come with free connection, wireless router, security software and unlimited downloads as standard.

The offer is open to everyone, not only O2 mobile customers, however mobile customers will benefit from a cheaper monthly costs. The packages vary in cost from £7.50 a month to £17.50 a month, with top download speeds ranging from 8Mbps to 20Mbps.

Unlimited usage is included with every O2 Broadband service.

Be Broadband, the UK’s leading provider of ADSL2+ broadband owned by O2, has hinted that it may unroll its own fibre-optic network to rival those of Virgin Media and BT. This news comes a day after it was announced that BT may be opening up its fibre network in the same manner as it currently does with its copper lines.

According to a post over at ISP Review, Be has responded enthusiastically to the news:

“The news that BT are preparing to open up so that other broadband providers can run their own high-speed broadband networks through their infrastructure will help us and other businesses better assess the case for fibre deployment. Although we will wait until BT confirms this move before revealing any of our own plans, one thing for certain is that the UK lags behind most of Europe now in terms of rolling out fibre broadband, which can’t persist for longer.”

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O2 is extending it’s offer of two months of free broadband until the end of the month.

The deal which sees new customers able to claim up to £45 off of their broadband bill was originally due to finish at the end of January but the deal has instead been extended until the end of the month.

New customers signing up for any of the three O2 broadband packages, that’s Standard, Premium and Pro, will be able to get the first two months for free. O2 mobile customers on contract or pay as you go benefit from reduced prices for O2 broadband. Despite this, the offer is open to everyone regardless of who they get their mobile services from.

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O2 has just announced that from March this year it will be offering fixed-line voice calls along with mobile phone and broadband services.

This make O2 a triple-play competitor, now competing with mobile rivals Orange and Virgin Media on three fronts.

O2 will be launching two home phone packages, Evening & Weekend and Anytime. The Evening & Weekend option costs £9.50 a month and provides calls to UK residential numbers.

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The Mobile Broadband January Sale has begun. As well as vying each other for the most iPhone sales, O2 and Orange are now cutting the costs of their respective mobile broadband packages.

O2 is currently offering its 3GB Mobile Broadband package on 24 month contracts for just £10 per month for the first 4 months (£15 thereafter). The USB dongle comes included free of charge and the contract comes with unlimited Wi-Fi use.

O2’s Pay As You Go Mobile Broadband offering has also taken a price tumble. The USB dongle originally cost £30 (OK, £29.99) which has now been cut down to £20. Customers then pay either £2 per day for a 0.5GB (500MB) usage allowance, £7.50 for 7 days with 1GB or £15 for 30 days of 3GB. There is no contract or long-term commitment. As with the 3GB pay montly option, unlimited Wi-Fi is also included.

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A lot has happened in the UK broadband market in 2009. Here’s a quick round up of the some of the big changes in broadband that have taken place over the last 12 months.

Tiscali gets bought by TalkTalk

Poor old Tiscali spent 2008 looking for a buyer without success and its woes continued into 2009. Despite many ISPs sniffing around hoping to steal a quick march on BT, nobody was willing to dig deep in their wallets. With deals collapsing at the last minute and its parent company losing millions of Euros on the continent times looked bleak for Tiscali’s UK arm. Then TalkTalk came to the rescue at the eleventh hour and swept Tiscali of it’s feet.

Speeding Up

2009 has seen a lot of speeding. BT, Orange and PlusNet all revved up their top download speeds to 20Mbps and 24Mbps in the case of Eclipse Internet. BT also released the Broadband Accelerator speed booster pack allowing customers to benefit from a more reliable broadband experience.

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We might be seriously lagging behind other countries in terms of speed but us Great Brits are pretty fond of our gigabits if this Ofcom survey is anything to go by. Compared with the USA, France, Germany, Spain and Italy the UK can boast the lowest prices for single line (i.e. not bundled with voice calls) and mobile broadband services. Prices for fixed-line voice calls are also the second lowest, after Italy.

Ed Richards, chief executive of Ofcom, said: “The report shows that UK consumers have benefited from competition in the form of lower prices. Innovation means that the UK is well placed in the take up and availability of digital services.”

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Come next-gen broadband and fall on Slough! It isn’t fit for dial-up now. As well as Jimmy Carr, the Wernham Hogg Paper Company and that John Betjeman poem, Slough can now count high speed mobile broadband among Things It’s Famous For.

O2, whose UK headquarters are  in the Berkshire town, has distributed next-gen LTE dongles to test out their new high speed mobile network. LTE, short for Long Term Evolution technology, is looking set to replace 3G as the next high speed mobile broadband technology.

A piece in today’s Telegraph states that the LTE dongles given out in the O2 trial are theoretically capable of providing top speeds of 150Mbps.

This could mean that super-fast speeds could be rolled out without the need for the expensive and time consuming installation of a nationwide fibre network.

Part of the Digital Britain report mentioned that future solutions for Broadband Britain (2Mbps speeds in every home by 2012) would involve a mixture of traditional physical connections (phone lines and cable) and wireless solutions.

LTE ought to allow for all sorts of mobile broadband goodness such as seamless streaming of HD videos, downloads of huge playlists, online mobile gaming… everything that a fast fixed-line connection ought to allow for.

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