Quite recently, O2 UK seem to have updated their European data roaming policy for both Pay & Go and Pay Monthly customers who are on O2 Travel.

It used to be £1.99 for 15MB 25MB of data, but now it seems O2 are offering 50MB of data for Pay & Go customers and, I quote: “no upper usage limit” for Pay Monthly customers.

Immediately I was very surprised, “no upper usage limit”, how can that possibly be? It almost sounds like unlimited internet for just £2 a day whilst in Europe.

Alas, however, since O2 does attach a rather large caveat to this offer: “Traffic management steps apply”. If you click further down into the Terms & Conditions, there actually is an upper usage limit of 50MB for streaming video and 100MB for general internet traffic. After you use up your allowance, you are slowed down to a literal crawl (looks to be 64kbps or similar speed), which is practically useless.

It seems that O2 are mis-advertising their “no upper usage limit” when in fact, it is 100MB. The last time I checked 100MB was an upper usage limit? Of course, they get round it by not entirely stopping the service but slowing it down to the point of unusability. I would prefer it if O2 simply stated “100MB for £2 a day, send a text message to get another 100MB” like previously, but instead once you’ve used up your allowance you have to wait until the next day to return to normal browsing speeds.

Even better: Why can’t O2 just copy Vodafone and offer £2 a day to make use of your own home allowance of GB’s/minutes/texts? To me this seems most reasonable. Even better still, since Telefonica owns both O2 and Movistar, abolish data roaming charges altogether? It’s going to happen anyway, why not just get a head start on the competition?