O2: Impressions after 2 weeks

I ordered O2 Broadband when we moved into our new flat. Promptly they sent us a Thompson TH585 v7 DSL router/modem. Within a few days the line was attached and the modem duly got connected. Yay.

Inital speed for the first few days was 0.5 Mbit/sec. Was a little disappointed when the 8 Mbit/sec line, which O2 estimated that at 0.3 of a mile from the exchange should have delivered 6 MBit/sec.

After a week, the speed did increase, nightly (between 8pm and midnight) gave me speeds of around 3 Mbit/sec. The other morning I tried testing at 7am, and got 6.2 Mbit/sec. Cool.

On the down side, the “O2 Wireless Box II”, that’s the Thompson TG575 v7, running firmware 7.4.20.5, seems to have a bad habit of spontaneously rebooting, around every 1 – 2 days! It is frequent enough to be annoying.

I spoke to the O2 support line (since the only “Ask Amy” KB was particularly useless), who advised me to re-flash the same firmware, which I’ll try in a  few days, but I don’t hold much hope. There’s a version 8.2.x release on the Thompson web site, but — as seems to b common with some DSL providers — the actual DSL login details are hidden, so changing to a non-branded firmware may prove difficult. Sky Broadband (a.k.a. EasyNet) did the same thing.