Gadget Blog

It looks as though the o2 network has suffered some major issues over the last two days. o2 have said (to the BBC) that ‘they will not disclose the cause of the outage but they know what it is and engineers are working to resolve the issue’.

I’ve noticed over the last two days that my iPhone signal and 3G/GPRS data access has been poor. I have just started a new job located in a brand new building in the South East of England. The new building seems to have a major problem that was not noticed much until it was completed and populated with office workers. The building seems to act as a Faraday cage and therefore not mobile signals get in or out.

Once I’d escaped the new office building my signal did come back, but only a little.

On my way home from work yesterday I tried to make a couple of calls (on handsfree bluetooth) with no success. I thought it was maybe because the phone had been in a ‘Faraday Cage’ all day and decided to reset it. Afterwards I could make a couple of calls but they would keep cutting out.

When I left work today to attend a meeting on the other side of the M25 I used my iPhone’s built in Satellite Navigation (Maps) so that I could follow it to my destination. Normally I need a 3G signal to get the best data connection to download the route and map/s for the journey.

The trip took me about 1 hr and during that time I tried to get the iPhone to connect to the Internet to create my route for me…!!

Every now and again I would pick up a 3G signal and try again but no luck. – I gave up when I was nearly at the destination and used good old fashioned intuition to guide me.

I tried most of the rest of the evening to get a 3G signal as well as make some phone calls to no avail.

WHAT HAS HAPPENED?           WHAT CAUSED THE OUTAGE? –

I think I know why…

o2 initially confirmed that the outage was caused in the London area and was due to capacity issues (ie, it was being used by too many mobiles, like the o2 iPhone). They then corrected themselves and said that it seemed to be affecting the entire UK Network.

I believe that the popularity with the iPhone across the UK has reached a critical mass on the o2 Network and as such when loads of connections are being made to it from many users there is no more bandwidth to provide.

I know that some people have managed to run network data usage tools on the iPhone and that doing a few simple tasks where an Internet connection is required can eat up a lot of bandwidth and connections to the o2 network.

Simply enough o2 have a LOT of work to do to increase capacity on their network and will have to hope, in the meantime, that not as many users use the Internet during that time.

Also remember that o2 have also signed an exclusive contract to sell the next smart phone in the recent battle for supremacy, the Palm Pre. (By the way, I shall be doing a Palm Pre review and comparrison against the iPhone soon).

As at the time of writing this o2 have not yet said when the issues will be fixed or what caused it.