Scam called O2 internet and AnyData modem for 10 000 CZK
The undescribed masterpiece of O2’s post-November management is and is not a scam. But it was certainly one of the golden nuggets, before the Telefónica acquisition. A standard contract, a few small print pages thickly described. Anyone who read it will have come across mention of 1:50 aggregation. But O2 didn’t specify the connection speed for CDMA internet service. As with fixed connections, it was generally known that “it runs” at speeds of up to 2 or 3MB/s. By comparison, the normal speed of a UPC cable connection at the same time was 10MB/s; ADSL technology allowed you to browse at speeds of 2 to 5MB/s. In cities.
Outside the cities, the situation was different. There was no cable internet, ADSL worked slower, poorly or not at all as the distance from SLAM increased. Thus, in the early days of digitalisation, virtually everyone outside the city of over 10,000 inhabitants had a problem with internet access. These were tens of thousands of users.
And here, somewhere in O2, an idea was born. The company acquired a licence to the NMT band, which remembered the 5kg Nokia Talkman mobile phone. The company then launched a new product, mobile CDMA internet, on the 450MHz frequency. Mobile internet it was, of course, a mobile phone with a touchscreen and browser did not exist at the time. All “data” traffic was handled by WAP technology. Using a special code or preset menu, it was then possible to get weather information or sports scores. So nobody bought it as mobile but only as fixed internet over the air. Later came GPRS.
A modem was needed for the connection, similar to DSL. To avoid looking like a resurrection of a dead technology, O2 bought up old stocks of overproduction from somewhere in the East and, although they did not have the modems branded with their own logo, they made sure that it was impossible to identify the brand and model of the modem.
The fact that it was an AnyData modem, widely used in Asia at the time for a few hundred, was only discovered after about three years, thanks to the U:Foun company, which continued to ride the 450MHz band and pissed off the rest of the uninformed users. U:Foun was offering internet on the same technology without a contract, but the newer AnyData modem only cost about 1/3 the price.
And what was the nature of the trick? Although O2 honestly stated the 1:50 aggregation in the contract, it did not specify the minimum guaranteed speed. If someone understood what aggregation was for an internet connection, they could have calculated it. So the only information was the modem speed (up to 3Mb/s) and references from users, who in discussions on the Internet quoted speeds of 1 to 2 MB/s. Which was a sufficient speed for normal internet browsing. About half a year after the contract was signed, the connection actually reached those values. But then something changed, and for the next year and a half the internet was completely unusable at 0.1 Mbps. O2 was only willing to terminate the contract if the customer paid the contract price for the modem provided.
The required 10,000 CZK was often a net monthly salary after 2005 🙂
Source https://notebook.cz/clanky/prislusenstvi/2006/anydata-Adu-e100h
Source https://web.archive.org/web/http://obchod.ufon.cz/cs/u-fonuv-fofr-internet
Source : Correspondent