Mass protest planned against O2 data-capping

The announcement by O2 UK that it would impose new download capping limits has provoked existing users to mount a campaign to crash the company's UK network.

The Twitter-based protest action is calling for O2 subscribers angered by the ending of 'unlimited' data plans to conduct a mass download of data on 24 June. The intent, seemingly, is to consume all the available O2 data capacity and effectively crash the network. Needless to say, this proposal has triggered a response from a growing number of O2 users stating that this irresponsible action would only go to prove O2's argument to reinstate data caps.

However, a study conducted by UK-based MacFormat asked nearly 1,000 iPhone owners how much data they had consumed and over what time period. The result, if the top one per cent was excluded, indicated that the average monthly data download was just over 220Mb.

"Four in five people use less than 500Mb a month, and only one in ten uses more data than O2's standard plans allow for," said MacFormat's Chris Phin.

According to Phin, this one per cent of the iPhone owners surveyed used 10Gb of data a month or more--presumably by jailbreaking their iPhones and tethering them, which effectively skewed the average data download used across all users to nearly 720Mb.

O2 said it planned to ask new users to sign contracts for 250Mb, 500Mb or 1Gb of data per month.

For more on this story:
- read TechWorld & TechRadar

For more on this story:
Operators dump unlimited data offerings; file sharing blamed
Western Europe data market is potentially enormous
O2 UK defends network quality (perhaps too much?)
Vodafone to stop data download abuse, intros out-of-bundle charges