I got to CDMA because, like most people here, I dreamed of some fast internet. Complaints to O2 went out several times a week, but we were always curtly brushed off with “it will be ready next week”, then next week it was another week, and it went on like that for weeks. Yes, that is why for Christmas I got unlimited internet, which my dad brought right into my little room the day before Christmas Eve.
Even back then I cursed them in my head, because I had heard on the internet what kind of crap this was, but I had to put up with it, because even though there are about 10 Wi-Fi ISPs in our area, none of them would connect us. One of them came right to our house just to tell us that it would not work here.
We were only in touch by phone with the others; some told us they had no capacity left, others said we could connect, but only to Javorový (that is our highest mountain at 1,013 m above sea level) and at the business rate, which comes to roughly 5,000 CZK a month. I do not even know whether that was with or without tax. After I hooked it up, it was a nightmare, I am telling you.
Read on and never! Take NOTHING from O2, even if they paid you for it, because you only have one set of nerves. That very same day I tried to install it – but my computer was still running Win98, so I tried to put Win2K on it, using floppy disks that I had downloaded from MS.
In DOS mode everything went fine, but when it was supposed to boot into the graphical interface for the first time, the same DOS error appeared every time. An outdated BIOS. Fine, I searched the internet for BIOSes for this motherboard, but I could not find a free one. So we took it to a PC repair shop, where they not only flashed the BIOS but also installed WinXP and added 128 MB of memory. Maybe more could have been added, but I am not so sure about that. We hooked it up at home, but the speed was truly miserable, painfully so.
Without an antenna it was practically impossible to connect here, so I began to hate O2. Every day I visited CDMA.cz until it started driving me crazy – the posts that appeared in the discussion forum only made it worse. From the very start of the discussion there was nothing but negative complaints, but that probably did not bother O2. Meanwhile I tried all sorts of tricks with the antenna – I hung off the gutter, put fridge magnets under it, coins, wrapped it in aluminum foil, turned it like an arrow, but nothing helped.
In the end I reached the highest speed when I took the whole cable (it is about 3 m long) and wrapped it around the antenna like a snake. It was a work of art, and with that speed I was no longer at the bottom of the rankings for CDMA speed. I kept cursing my dad for taking it and signing up for two years – because we lost 25,680 CZK.
The annual flat fee was 1070, the plan was called Eurotel “” and it was marketed as high-speed internet with speeds of up to 1 Mb/s. The important part is that little phrase “up to”, because coming from Errortel it meant up to them, whenever they felt like it. Since I was on a PC that had no network card, I was the only one with internet, and let me tell you, getting online on a computer like that was torture by today’s standards. Back then I had never come across anything better, so I just grumbled quietly. The next Christmas I got a laptop, toward which I contributed 4,000 CZK and my dad put in 13,000.
That one already had a network card, so I connected the second PC too through Windows internet sharing. I had long since learned to download from RS at full speed by changing my IP, but at first it was not that easy. It was all the fault of Rapget, which is a program for noobs, and some Eurotel Reconnecter that was making a fool of me. On its forum lots of people complained about its problems, but the author did not register any of it. In the end I understood what was going on and started looking hard for a replacement.
So I combined a bat file with USD, which also had automatic captcha recognition. I forgot to mention the antenna – I bought an external professional one for 1,500 CZK and connected it to the modem with a pigtail. The speed was now truly luxurious – it was no problem to reach 150 KB/s at any time of day. The ping was also within tolerable limits. Upload ran at maximum too (11-12 KB/s). So there was nothing to complain about, and when I checked cdma.cz at night to see the average speed (usually 800-999 kb/s) and compared it with mine (1500-2k), my heart leapt with joy every time.
Toward the end of the contract, though, downloading stopped being fun – especially since I did everything by hand. I only listened to internet radio, and one fine day the radio kept stuttering badly. I turned it off and ran a speed test. God, how well I knew that ritual! For the rest of my life I will remember dsl.cz (the spinning wheel), rychlost.cz (download test in progress), and others. The speed was capped at 3 KB/s, even at night, which surprised me the most!! We had 2.5 months left on the contract and I really did not see this coming.
But now I understand how they thought at ET – if someone downloads, leave them alone, or they would come and smash our faces in, but if someone uses the net only occasionally, throttle them so that they end up using it all day. Apparently the network could not handle the constant logging in and out. And once again I started bombarding technical support with emails – but every time I got copy-pasted templates signed by one of the staff. I asked about CDMA, whether there was a problem at the BTS, but nobody got back to me.
Maybe they shut them down completely. That is how I limped to the end, and this time Christmas brought an ADSL router. I could not stand O2 anymore, so I hooked everything up with great reluctance. But because we are far from the exchange, the internet just would not get going here. So once again our complaints were filed with the customer technical care department and once again we always got the same answer. Finally a technician came to us, who connected the router properly but plugged the cable from my own router into the PC, the one I had bought earlier for a sinful 3,000 CZK.
It is an ASUS WL 500G and it has two USB ports – more devices can be connected via a hub. Later O2 had it on offer too, at the same price. Although the developers who made it are said to be very intelligent people, my experience with the parcel was the opposite. They sent it addressed to the name “sunamo”.
The worst part was that on that very day I decided I did not want the router; it was not too late yet, all it took was to call my dad. But I did not do it and I was 3,000 CZK poorer. Now I remember that we also went several times to buy a pigtail, whose official price was 220 CZK. During those experiments you really could figure things out. The best was when I put the modem on the wardrobe and then moved it by millimeters. You would not believe it, but this had a truly radical effect, and the speed then stayed steady.
From then on, CDMA left me fairly satisfied, but the last thing that took my breath away was when I stopped downloading. The speed immediately dropped to 2 KB/s, and that was 2 months before the end of the term. Absolutely nothing helped, not even repeated complaints to O2 by both phone and email. In the end I cancelled it and got ADSL. Basically out of the frying pan into the fire, because it is the same company.
At first it refused to work here; it only started after pulling the trick with the cables. The speed began to stagnate at 100 KB/s and does not change. Only after upgrading to 8 and 16 MB/s did it drop slightly to 90, even at night. I have 2 explanations for this. Either O2 assigns everyone bandwidth regardless of what they download, or O2 throttles it artificially, or something is wrong with the network, or everyone is downloading.