I've just switched from Sky to O2. First impressions are the signal from the router is awful. With the router in the living room and the PC in the spare room, I'm getting a wireless signal of about 11mbps, often dropping to 1mbps, whereas on the previous Sky router it was consistently 50mbps.

Anyone else experienced this? There's some chat about it on the web and I could use another router but I wanted to see if it's still a common problem or if the router is faulty.

Secondly, I'm on an LLU line, about 1km from the exchange. It's a new build property so the wiring in the building should be decent. O2 estimated I'd be getting up to 8meg but in reality it maxes out around 4.5meg which was about the same as I was getting with Sky. Given that I'm reasonably close to the exchange on an LLU, ADSL2 line I'd have expected to get close to the 8meg. The router is connected to the main socket in the house and there's no test socket behind the cover plate. I've got one of these combined TV/ Satellite/ Phone sockets on the wall and someone suggested this may be the cause of the low speed?

Any experiences with swapping one of these for separate units and would it make a difference?

We have moved from Eclipse internet to O2 (mainly due to cost and the good review O2 get, not that Eclipse was bad) and the internet seems to drop out a hell of a lot at home. Constantly having to go into the wireless settings on the computer and reconnecting to the network (happening on both computers that worked fine on Eclipse).

Tempted to try the old router to see if that will make any difference, so if you have an old router kicking around, i'd try that and see what (if any) difference it makes.

Yip, getting that too.

which router have you got? I've got the O2 Wireless Box II (has Thomson written on the side).

It's fantastic, far better signal than my Sky (Netgear) one. No more signal drop-outs or slow speeds.

FWIW I get rock solid 6.5-8mbit on O2, whereas I could only get 3.5 – 4mbit on SKY (their laughable high contention 'max speed' package where you cannot even watch iPlayer without constant rebuffering)

Is your phone socket wired correctly? (There's a common mistake to do with the 'ring loop' IIRC)

bell wire on the socket is disconnected.

NOt sure of the brand of O2 box as it's at home. It's white IIRC.

I just changed to O2 – my connection is way faster (2meg rather than 512k) but the o2 router is a bit rubbish.

I called O2 and they talked me through setting up my netgear router (all the settings – including the username and password that were not apparent to me). Properly helpful!