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O2 Broadband review

From £8.17 a month

Manufacturer: O2

Our Rating: We rate this 4.5 out of 5

By | PC Advisor | 11 January 11

With a healthy slice of the smartphone market, thanks to the success of the Apple iPhone, O2 is in a great position to offer cut-price broadband deals for customers on its phone tariffs. And it pulls it off, winning our 2011 ISP Awards Best Buy tag.

With a healthy slice of the smartphone market, thanks to the success of the Apple iPhone, O2 is in a great position to offer cut-price broadband deals for customers on its phone tariffs. And it pulls it off, winning our 2011 ISP Awards Best Buy tag.

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A £5 monthly discount means O2 is one of the cheaper ISPs, with perceived good value as a result. Nearly half its customers pay less than £10 a month for their broadband service – neatly tallying with the 49 percent who also get both mobile phone and web services from O2 – with a further 22 percent paying £14.99 a month.

See also: What's the best UK broadband ISP? PC Advisor's 2011 Broadband Survey report

Nearly 20 percent of O2 customers are Mac users or live in a mixed Mac and Windows household. Its customers are heavy web users, with the familiar Facebook/Twitter/Spotify/iPlayer mix of activities cited.

Most users are signed up to subscriptions offering connection speeds of 5 to 8Mbps and 12 to 15Mbps, and the service provided was not far off in most cases. Feedback here showed perceived connection speeds more closely matched those promised than did other ISPs’. Overall satisfaction is also impressively high at 96 percent. With O2-owned Be Broadband provisioning some customers’ connections, this perhaps is no real surprise. Indeed, download-speed satisfaction is 90.8 percent.

NEXT: our expert verdict >>

O2 Broadband Expert Verdict »
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BT landline, O2 account
  • Overall: We give this item 9 of 10 overall

Connection reliability of 92 percent, and near-perfect scores for technical support and customer service, meant O2 received the highest billing overall across both dedicated and bundled broadband providers.

There are currently no price comparisons for this product.
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