O2 takes a Christmas break
IP addresses snowed in
O2 is again struggling to get IP addresses to its customers, leaving many of them without data connectivity since yesterday lunchtime.
Anyone who held open a session is fine, but lose your IP address and the operator admits they can't promise you another one - but engineers are working on it.
The same thing happened back in July, with the same result, so one might hope it had been fixed properly by now. The outage is particularly badly timed with Vodafone announcing they'll be offering Apple's iPhone in January, perhaps with a more-reliable network.
Some O2 customers have had luck changing their APN to "mobile.o2.co.uk", which worked last time too, but this time around it's not working for everyone and most customers would prefer not to mess about changing APN settings just to get a connection.
We asked O2 who provided the software for allocating IP addresses, given it failed equally spectacularly back in July, but apparently the company isn't willing to name and shame suppliers.
We'll look into it and let you know. ®
Regcast training : Hyper-V 3.0, VM high availability and disaster recovery
COMMENTS
Inquiring minds
"is this for 3G data or home broadband"
Logical minds would probably jump to the conclusion it's 3G data, just from the references to APNs and iPhones. Or by reading the linked article where it's happened before.
Is this for 3G data or home broadband?
Inquiring minds want to know
There are a few things that it could be
It was probably an issue with the ggsn, networks are really bad at quickly fixing these things.
An APN name is just a DNS address that points your pdp context to a set of servers. it could be anyhting from there that isn't handing out the IPs properly.
If you already have a session its likey that the radius server is buggered.
as for 3's data coverage. Its one of the best in the UK. Voda, O2, orange are shit and T-mobile shares the wireless network with 3 so they have the same coverage.

IT infrastructure monitoring strategies
Requirements Checklist for Choosing a Cloud Backup and Recovery Service Provider
Cloud based data management
Enabling efficient data center monitoring
Agentless Backup is Not a Myth