O2 Pay & Go Review

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3.6 stars
Average rating for this product is: 3.6 out of 5

From 3 ratings and 9 reviews

Thumb up 67% of users recommend this product

Best Price: £FREE !

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Buy's Review of O2 Pay & Go

3rd May 2006

Overall Rating

1.5 stars
  • Value for money
    4.5 stars
  • Tariff Features
    2.5 stars
  • Time spent with Tariff
    Over 1 Year
Good Points

300 free texts
Unlimited free texts while they're not paying attention


Bad Points

Awful reliability
Little to no customer service
Annoying alerts disguised as free stuff


General Comments

I've been with O2 for a couple of years now. If you buy the SIM card online you're entitled to 300 free texts each month, provided you top up by £10 or more each month. Seems like a good deal, and it is.

Unfortunately, the O2 network is very poor. Reception is scattered, and phone calls will often cut off for no reason. Around 1 in 10 text messages takes at least 24 hours to reach its destination, although this has improved recently. Overall, the quality of the service is pretty awful.

In buying online and getting such a good deal, you're also expected to use the online customer service (ie. email) rather than calling them. You can still phone up customer services but you'll get heavily charged for doing so. However, the customer service is dire. It's painfully obvious that no-one at O2 reads your email, but simply issue a standard response. It's been many emails and several months later, and still they've been unable to answer my very basic question.

In addition to the texts, O2 also give you other free things. These include 10% off your top-ups back every so often, and a "treat" of your choice (15 free minutes or so). These are nice, but they're such a pain to activate, and each involves receiving 5 or more messages informing you of the progress of your treat, and half the time you never get your free things anyway. It's really not worth the hassle. I don't want my phone company to give me useless gifts. I want them to do their job and leave me alone.

Recently there has been a change. I can only imagine that O2 are having trouble with their system, as I haven't topped up in over 4 months and I am still receiving free texts. As nice as this is, it doesn't give me a great deal of confidence in O2's ability to keep track of my account.

I would very much like to leave O2 and change to a network that will provide a basic reliable service, with no hidden surprises, annoying alerts, or stupid tariffs. Unfortunately, with Orange selling animal tariffs, T-Mobile penalising you for having friends on other networks, Vodafone still charging 12p a text, and Virgin doing goodness-knows-what... I'm stuck with O2.

And besides, I've sent over 1000 texts and made a few phone calls, and it's only cost me £5.04. Bargain.

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Members' Comments onBuy's Review

  • nataliewood631 on 30th Jul 2007

    By the way I agree with what you have written because I have exactly the same O2 sim card, but I would just like to inform you that Virgin is a very good network and you have excellent signal. I am due to change to that network in 5 months.