o2 base station down again

markish99

o2 seem to be having a lot of problems with their network locally. My local base station at home is down, and has been since Wednesday. I have called o2 several times and they are not committing to a fix date. I have zero service. The problem is that there are four mobiles in my house, and they are all on o2 pay monthly and we don't have a landline because the broadband speed was too slow - we have wireless.

So therein is the problem - we don't have any facility to make/receive calls in a conventional manner. o2 have advised that we can use an app called TU GO which uses our wifi connection to make and receive calls (conveniently it doesn't allow us to call o2), but why should I use my bandwith to prop up a failing network?

There have been other o2 outages locally - one where I work which affected approximately 5000 users, and it took a month of calling, contacting the local press, organising a Twitter campaign and involving the local MP before they fixed it. They kept fobbing me off stating that their engineers had been to the base, but had issues fixing the mast. This I knew to be a complete lie, because the mast was on top of a local business, and I knew the owner, and he confirmed that they had never attended.

Eventually, under duress, they fixed it, but I am not hopeful for my home base station because it is a semi rural location. o2's coverage has become increasingly shambolic over the last six months, I have even discovered that they have not completely covered the M25!! This is a company that advertises that it spends £1.5m a day on its network infrastructure. Well, I'd love to know where they are spending it - my guess is that they are painting masts or something....

Onto my point, has anybody got any tips for how I can strong arm them into sorting the repair out? They will not let me cancel contracts without termination fees.