My 5G has always been bad on O2. Bad enough that I upgraded my phone at one point because a review mentioned the model I had was known to be weak on 5G. That didn’t fix it. Today I reached the end of two decades as an O2 customer, and it took about ten minutes in a supermarket car park.
The Package That Wasn’t Being Used
I’ve been with O2 a long time - decades, not years. My plan was 20GB of data, unlimited texts and minutes, with any unused data rolling over to the next month. Reasonable on paper. Over the last twelve months the price crept up from £10 to £15, and I’d never once come close to using the 20GB, because I could never get a usable signal anywhere it mattered.
My data use is light by design. Wifi at home, wifi in the office, so the only time I actually need mobile data is train stations, navigating when travelling, and the odd moment somewhere without wifi. None of that is remote: my worst spots are the train stations between home and the office in Milton Keynes. Not the back of beyond.
Ten Minutes in a Car Park
My wife had gone into the shops, I was in the car with the dogs, and I checked my phone out of habit. No 5G signal. I flicked over to 4G manually and got something, at least. I had about ten minutes before she’d be back with the Sunday roast, so I used them.
I asked AI to find me a network that didn’t run on O2’s own infrastructure (Telefonica), since switching to another SIM that quietly rides the same towers wouldn’t fix anything. It came back with spusu. I had an eSIM activated in a few clicks, swapped my data over to it, and ran a speed test in the same car park O2 had just given me nothing in.
50Mbps download. From the network O2 couldn’t even give a 5G bar to.
Giving O2 One Last Chance
I didn’t migrate my number straight away - I gave myself a week or two to actually test both properly before deciding.
O2’s 4G in that same car park: 2Mbps. 5G: nothing, again. At home - in a city, not a field - O2 still had no 5G. spusu managed 40Mbps there, a bit short of the car park number but still working. Train stations, my known weak spot, were worse than the car park: O2 regularly failed to even complete a DNS lookup, which meant doing the signal-hunting dance at the station taxi rank trying to book an Uber home. spusu held up fine in the same spots, and I even tested it moving, on the train itself, swallowing my usual travel sickness to do it - 30Mbps while in motion, somewhere O2 had been giving me nothing for years.
The Usage Gives It Away
I’d always described my own data use as light, and mostly believed it. Then I looked back at last month’s O2 usage - data switched on the entire time - and found 419MB used out of a 19GB allowance, with four days still left in the billing period.
A few days into testing spusu, I’d already used 1.2GB. That’s not a change in how I use my phone, it’s a change in whether I could.
I also checked the coverage maps for both networks at my home address, and they’re near enough identical - both claim good coverage all around me. On paper, O2 should be giving me exactly what spusu does. In practice, some of my spusu speed tests at home have hit 70Mbps download. Upload is weaker, around 3Mbps, but that’s not what I need from a phone, and the usage I’m actually getting backs the speed tests up.
Why spusu, of All Things
spusu runs on the EE network, which gave me pause. My experience with EE’s predecessors, Orange and T-Mobile, was not good, and EE is now owned by BT, which didn’t exactly raise my expectations either. But at £6.90 a month for 15GB, it was a cheap enough bet. The 20GB I’d been rolling over on O2 was worthless if I couldn’t get a signal to use it, and if 15GB turns out to be tight, spusu lets me add another 5GB for £2. No contract, rolling monthly.
A fraction of what O2 wanted, working in every place O2 didn’t. Bye bye, O2.
Not a sponsored post, not an advert - just an honest opinion about loyalty buying you nothing.