I just had to announce that on Friday night, in central Manchester I was without mobile for 4 hours with the o2 network down. i tried calling my Friends on o2 and couldn't get in touch either. Headed out for a night out and a few punters were complaining about there phones not working - til I told them o2 was down..

There we have it. (I'm assuming it's got something to do with them downgrading their network to work with EDGE).

The bloody thing went over this morning as well. Which meant that I was only able to find out the time the train would arrive as it arrived at the station. Useless bunch!

Probably someone installing an upgraded covert network data splitter.

OK who are you and what have you done with our friend " amanfromMars"??

(yes, I actually understood that post)

Are you the BOFH by any chance? Sounds like very BOFH excuse....

Covert network data splitter? And this is a sinister fascist attempt to find out what we're doing? Sorry, this is paranoid silliness. If someone does install such a thing, then it'd be to anticipate very real threats of public bombings and the like - or else to update our Tesco Clubcard records, or similar.

Nobody gives a hoot about what you or I do, except your and my families and friends, hopefully. This isn't the Cold War anymore. There is no 'battle of ideologies'. There are no more reds, nor feds, under the bed.

(No, not the same Steve).

It (data, I was able to send/receive texts) was apparently out on Friday (28th) afternoon and early evening for some time too...or at least I couldn't get a connection.

Yeah great, except T-Mobile were down for hardly any time, sorted it promptly, and, when we called customer services, as always they answered quickly, and unlike certain other networks (*cough* 3 etc) immediately confirmed an issue and that it was being dealt with.

they rely on BT for backhaul and so idiot wen through a line with a digger

Having enountered the failures on Monday morning, I thought I'd check whether or not it had even registered on my account.

To my shock and disgust </sarcasm>, I found that Virgin mobile (who piggyback off T-Mobile) had charged in total a princely sum of 6p for the various failed connections. So I fired off an "email" via the web based contact form asking fer my money back...and they've just called me to let me know that they will be refunding my 6p. I feel great - possiblly almost as good as watching the rugby last Saturday.

hey no ones perfect at least it was resolved as soon as possible and as for blackberry users its thier own misfortune for relying on the service mobiles are primarily for talking after all

as an ageing Telecomms engineer , now in a field in Italy, we used to strive for many 9's of POTS availability, typically four nines core network, 99.99% , with five nines 99.999% uptime on the well designed microwave LOS backbone systems.

now I'm told by recent escapees from the Cell Fone Industry that new GSM etcetera basestations have NO UPS systems installed, in order to save installation & maintenance costs. This will achieve a grade of service based upon the reliability of the local electrical grid, and the density of nearby BTS. vulnerability to SCNI DoS?, irrelevant?? entire BT system going TCP/IP VoIP - hence vulnerable to everything bad on the interweb, irrelevant?? I suppose we should all be happy with a "two nines" service nowadays??

I could go on, but I'm sure I left my coat around here somewhere