O2 apologises for snags in London network

[Guest tsutton]

O2 apologises for snags in London network

A while back, O2 has some network issue in London which resulted in some people unable to access the Internet and making phone calls. Now the head of O2 has apologised to their customers about it.

The head of O2 has apologised to customers who could not make phone calls because the mobile operator’s London network was overwhelmed by bandwidth-hungry smartphones.

Ronan Dunne told the Financial Times he was disappointed with O2’s network performance in London since the summer. But the UK’s largest mobile phone operator was making good progress towards fixing the problems, he said.

O2 ran into significant network difficulties in the capital during the second half of 2009 as customers with smartphones such as Apple’s iPhone ramped up their use of applications that repeatedly pull data off the internet at short intervals.

As we are approaching 2010 very soon, and with more new phones on the way, where it will be using Internet a lot more (i.e. Twitter, Facebook, etc), will we see more of this happening across mobile phone operators when they've run out of bandwidth/performance? Will we see more downtime in 2010 compared with 2009? Or will we see improved network speeds?

Were you hit with the O2's network outage - how long did it last and how did it affect you?

[Via: FT.com - Telecoms]