Total Inability To Support User Phones: O2 fries, burning data for 32 million Brits

Re: Not just O2

Station guard?

No it's more akin to complaining to the ticket office, and then being told "Not my fault, mate, we hire the ticket machine from Job Bloggs Ltd. I'm working for <insert rail company here>. Not my problem."

If you bought a product or service from O2, your only legal, financial and customer-service recourse is to them, or an ombusdman of their industry. I don't care WHY they're having problems (whether that's that they haven't paid their bills, that their suppliers are useless, that their contractors didn't turn or, or that heavy snowfall in the Outer Hebrides stopped the consultant coming out today). That's up to their business processes to handle.

My only interaction with them would be via the service they are contracted to provide, and are failing to do so.

In the same way that no court would entertain someone saying "Well, my contractors didn't deliver the goods, so I couldn't give them to the customer who sued me" (they'd just tell them that's their issue, and irrelevant to the case, they are still bound by the contract whoever their goods come from), customer service, returns policies, etc. work the same. They would actually get sued by the customer, and then they would have to sue the supplier to get their money back if that was the case.

You only have to deal with the people you bought the good or service from. You NEVER have to deal with any one of their contractors or manufacturers. Otherwise quite literally you'd be given the run-around between 50 different companies who all do one bit of the work, in order to fob you off as long as possible.

Bought phone from shop and it doesn't work? Take it back to the shop. It's up to them to argue with Samsung/Apple.

Bought phone service from O2 and it doesn't work? You shout at O2. They can blame anyone they like, it's their responsibility, choice of contractor and problem to resolve, not mine.

Otherwise, you'll literally end up being told "Yeah, well, your local mast is run by Bloggs Masts Ltd, who we paid to run it. We don't care. Speak to them."

Re: Not just O2

In the US, at least, mobile operators and VOIP services were supposed to tell customers not to rely on the service for emergency services, as the networks don't have sufficient Ma-Bell approved reliability and resilience - as of a few years ago anyway. In other words, have a landline backup if you care about 24/7/365 availability guarantees for 999 service. Trouble is that no-one thinks about that nowadays, and the mobile network's probably almost always there. (Would be interested in the number of emergency calls missed due to network outages, presumably someone somewhere tracks that number.) Bet it's an infinitesimal fraction of the total number of 999 calls.

Re: Not just O2

this is why I still have a land line at home for emergency use

Re: Not just O2

"Of course not, I deal with hardware and software issues all day, expecting a mobile provider to maintain 100% uptime is like expecting politicians to never lie."

Yep, get that, your post suggested that because it was a third party behind O2, the O2 customers should be venting their annoyance at the third party.

Agreed the Nigel posts are amusing though. Like a non-real-life version of the poor guy called John Lewis who receives a lot of queries on Twitter as to where their sofa is...

@alien8n Re: Not just O2

"expecting a mobile provider to maintain 100% uptime is like expecting politicians to never lie."

Poiticians never lie. They reframe your question and answer based on an entirely different paradigm.

Re: Not just O2

"I bet you're one of those people who berates the platform guard at stations 'cos your train was cancelled?"

That doesn't really work as a comparison does it? If the argument was "stop berating the poor O2 customer services rep, it isn't his fault" then that's fine, but it wasn't.

Presumably TSB customers shouldn't have been annoyed with their bank over the summer, they should be complaining to Accenture instead?

Re: Pffft

Vodafone have recently been strapping SIM cards to cows butts with an outfit called MooCall, so you can add the number of pregnant bovines to the overall phone count too.

Re: Pffft

metoo - wife, gf1 and gf2

hey, the simple life is just too boring :-)

Re: Pffft

doesnt the smart electric meter network run on O2 aswell? Good job the things are useless.

Re: Backup?

People seem to carry a lot of stuff these days. I rarely carry little more than one visa card, one backup credit card, one phone, plenty of cash and two keys. I use a slim wallet for the cash and my mobile case for the cards, so I have no loyalty cards. If it doesn't comfortably fit in my trouser pocket then I don't carry it.

Re: Backup?

but is it open source?