Sometimes These Posts Write Themselves — O2 Caps 3G Speeds (original) (raw)

Sometimes it’s hard to grind out posts for the ol’ blog here. Conversely, sometimes they really do write themselves, like this morning.

From Vero at Taptu and James Whatley at SMS Text News comes word that O2 in the UK is capping downstream 3G speeds for most of its users at 128 Kbps.

Oh, but it gets better.

Some O2 PR rep mistakenly called a reporter from El Reg while still discussing how to respond to its story with a colleague. He referred to those wanting faster speeds as “a bunch of techie nerds”, and called anybody who’d want to leave the network a “muppet”.

Nice one. But there’s more.

As Vero and Whatley point out, somebody did a speed test on O2’s network and got these results:

GPRS 44kbit/sec
EDGE 145kbit/sec
3G 112kbit/sec
HSDPA 124kbit/sec

No, that’s not a mistake — O2’s EDGE network is faster than its HSDPA one, thanks to its ridiculous cap. Guess those billions O2 spent on 3G spectrum were really worth it, just so people could make video calls.

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