O2 claims diminished London network strain
updated 11:55 am EST, Tue December 29, 2009
Carrier minimizes public complaints
London iPhone use should now be somewhat more acceptable, says UK carrier O2, as quoted by Reuters. The company's network has seen a series of outages during the past six months, largely attributed to the intense data demands of the city's many iPhone users. O2 indicates that data traffic as a whole has increased 18 fold since the beginning of 2009.
The most recent downtime, which occurred just last week, resulted in public complaints from celebrities. O2 now claims however that increased network capacity has helped to alleviate problems since the beginning of December; the company has spent £30 million in upgrading its London network, for instance adding 200 extra base stations. There were no problems at all during the Christmas period, the carrier says.
O2 is distinct amongst British iPhone vendors for offering unlimited data. Orange restricts subscribers to 750MB per month, and Vodafone will limit people to 1GB when it launches the iPhone on January 14th. Unlimited traffic has proven to a problem not only in the UK, however, but in the US, where cities like New York and San Francisco regularly experience network congestion.
Grizzled Veteran
Joined: Jun 2001
Explain this then O2..
"O2 indicates that data traffic as a whole has increased 18 fold since the beginning of 2009."
But it's been c*** long before 2009.. I've had my iPhone since early 2008, and data transfer whilst roaming has always been feeble at best. So the much demanded 3G tech actually made no headway at all above the older 2.5G 1st generation iPhones. Because real world experience in and around London has shown that one is no faster than the other.