Virgin Mobile to O2 migration was a huge mess
First of all, I should start by saying that I was a Virgin Mobile customer myself, and I am now on the O2 network and I'm pretty happy with my unlimited data plan which I am paying £6.79 for (apart from VoLTE, VoWiFi and Visual Voicemail not working and it being questionable whether I am able to roam outside of the UK).
Today, I want to reflect at how bad the process of this whole migration process was. First, I ought to give you a timeline of events though.
Sometime around September 2022, Virgin Media started silently migrating customers to the O2 network, after changing from the EE network to the Vodafone network in the same year, all without any prior warning.
Then in mid-January, Virgin Mobile officially announced this in a blog post announcing all customers would be moving directly to O2 by the end of 2023 and mentioned everyone on Virgin Mobile is already using the O2 network, despite no official announcement before this. With this migration, Virgin Media also promised nobody's price would increase (technically this is a lie though if you were moved in April due to annual price rises of RPI + 3.9%, I think Virgin often moved people over one day before their refresh date), and all customers would get double or unlimited data. And if you didn't already have unlimited minutes (I only had 1500), it would even be made unlimited.
They then started sending out warnings of migrations in February in emails that would state how their plan would change and when customers were planned to be moved (these emails were sent roughly 30 days before people were planned to be migrated). The first customers to be migrated would be in March, and they'd get a text the day before warning them of the migration and two texts on the day of their migration with their O2 username and password. To migrate, users had to keep their phones on overnight.
Right now, that's pretty much the end of the timeline. Virgin Mobile still offers unbeatable plans for anyone who wants to be directly with the O2 network as long as they wait a few months. Right now, they have a 15GB rolling plan, which for some people was turned into 50GB when on O2 for only £6.99. Plus, if you have Virgin Media broadband, it's 100GB which is incredible. I expect we'll probably see Virgin Mobile stop taking new customers sometime in September, since migrations don't always succeed straightaway and may require a new O2 SIM (which I'd recommend anyways if you read on further).
Anyways, I want to now compile how bad this migration process was for some people.
First of all, I should give my own experiences. I don't really have much to say, VoLTE and VoWiFi was activated as soon as I migrated and I could use my plan as soon as it was done migrating. However, I couldn't get anything like visual voicemail to activate, and it only showed in the Google Phone app 3 days ago, where it is stuck on activating and won't show me any voicemails.
I should also mention that my VoLTE and VoWiFi disappeared a few months ago, and since then I've tried everything to get it to reappear (apart from calling 202 since I don't want to deal with customer service or texting ACTIVE to 2020 which constantly says it's busy) (according to the *#*#4636#*#* menu it is still provisioned on my phone anyways, it's an issue with IMS registration mainly). I also don't think I'm getting any regular voicemail notifications from O2, but to be fair the only phone calls I really get is from scammers pretending to be O2. Either way, I haven't had any issues other than those, but I find being on O2 quite slow compared to Vodafone since they operate from the same cellular towers in my area. Actually, I do have two more issues. Usually, if you have your WiFi turned off, you can access mymobile.o2.co.uk to show your allowances without signing into your account, but instead for me it makes me sign in. I'm not sure whether it's due to having another SIM migrate to O2 recently, but my phone is classified as the primary phone number anyways.
The other issue is that I'm not sure whether I'd be able to roam abroad if I wanted to. In settings, there should be like a Teléfonica option in network providers so that you can roam properly (see O2’s device guides for roaming for more information) but I don't see it and instead all I see is a Virgin Mobile entry, which makes me question whether roaming would work. Talking about accounts, I'm not sure whether I like the fact that O2 had sent out passwords to your account via SMS when you switched over and you didn't already have an O2 account. As we all know, SMS is insecure and it’s not encrypted. I would have preferred if they had gave instructions to people on how to set a password instead, so it wasn't sent so insecurely.
Now I want to go over other people's issues, because believe me, there's a lot of complaints about this horrible migration process. I'm looking at O2’s community forums for a lot of this.
https://community.o2.co.uk/t5/New-to-O2/Sim-contacts-disappeared-following-forced-switch/m-p/1644732#M2586
First of all, this is an issue someone pointed out with contacts disappearing. I think this happened to me in some capacity, particularly with Virgin numbers disappearing but I'm uncertain. I do find it odd that O2 can't like add any of their numbers to people's phones once they've migrated, I had like none of O2’s numbers when my phone migrated.
https://community.o2.co.uk/t5/New-to-O2/Don-t-have-access-to-internet/m-p/1643271#M2464
I've seen a lot of people complain that they don't have access to internet or phone calls on their device which is concerning. If I can find it, I saw a post the other day that claimed O2 ruined someone's time with their daughter!
https://community.o2.co.uk/t5/Tech-Support/Virgin-to-O2-swap-rollout/m-p/1643773
Apparently this person has had their signal strength show up worse on their Virgin SIM than a Tesco Mobile SIM. It's more than likely that O2 decided to choose a different band compared to Tesco (Tesco Mobile runs on the O2 network, and is partially owned by Teléfonica), but I've heard some weird oddities with Virgin SIMs anyways with the SIMs being originally from Belgium, and Apple users having issues on Virgin Mobile (doesn't happen if they've been migrated to O2) where the SIM thinks it's in Belgium, and instead of calling 01234 567890 as an example, it would instead call +32 (I think this is Belgium's country code iirc) 01 23 45 67 89 0.
https://community.o2.co.uk/t5/New-to-O2/Unable-to-make-online-purchases-using-Verified-by-Visa/m-p/1641615
This person cannot make a payment online for 3 whole days due to the migration. Great job! It's probably more Visa’s fault but still..
https://community.o2.co.uk/t5/Tech-Support/Unknown-number-on-ALL-incoming-calls/m-p/1639622
For some reason, quite a few people have had this happen where numbers appear as unknown which sucks.
Hoping all these posts have shown you all how botched this migration process was.
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