So, yesterday someone at Ericsson forgot to renew a certificate. This caused O2, giffgaff, Tesco Mobile, Sky and Lycamobile customers to lose all internet connectivity and there was some severe red faces as the O2 network ended up on the front pages of newspapers and websites for all the wrong reasons.
Today things are largely back to normal, and O2 have announced that they will indeed compensate customers for the outage. On their community pages they’ve announced that..
• For our Pay Monthly customers, SMB business customers and mobile broadband customers we will be crediting two days of monthly airtime subscription charges by the end of January
• For our Pay As You Go customers we will be giving a 10% credit on a top-up in the New Year and will let our customers know when it is available
• For our Pay As You Go mobile broadband customers we will be giving a 10% discount on a Bolt On purchase in the New Year and will let our customers know when it is available
They’ve also taken the opportunity to apologise again.
Now, using our very rough calculations, and basing this on a 31-day month, we can say that a customer on a £30 pay-monthly plan would get about £1.94 compensation. If you’re spending £50 per month with the network, you’re going to get the grand total of £3.23.
I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t sound very good.
“Sorry you didn’t have any data for an entire day, here’s a couple of quid. Go and buy yourself a packet of sweets.. only a small bag, mind.”
We’ve not heard about compensation being paid by O2 to the MVNO’s they provide network coverage for (giffgaff, Tesco, Sky, Lycamobile) and we’ve yet to hear from those companies about whether they’re going to offer compensation to their customers.