It’s hardly the shock of the century, as O2 has won a mobile broadband speed test commissioned by O2 themselves.

O2′s survey took part over 20 cities in the UK and found that O2 ‘apparently’ has the fastest music download speed, suceeding in 12 of the 20 cities tested. But only came second to Vodafone in web page download speed who were fastest in 5 of 20 cities, where O2 were fastest in four of the 20 cities., along with T-Mobile and Orange.

It’s also not very surprising that O2 hand-picked the 20 cities themselves for company Siroda to test – most likely where they had the strongest connections. Rural areas were also ommited from the tests which might reflect on O2′s poor coverage in these areas – in fact Ofcom noted just last year that they had the worst 3G connection in these areas.

The tests as “measured by testing the time taken to access a webpage and the speed of downloading a typical music file. Tests were conducted between 10am and 10pm Monday to Sunday, replicating genuine user patterns”.

In PC Pro’s mobile broadband test O2 was the worst performing network, clocking up a maximum speed of 2Mbps and a nationwide speed of 0.8Mbps.

So all this test shows is how best O2 can manipulate their publicity – hopefully noone falls for this.

by Richard Armitage