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Comment by jw1224 | Hacker News Reader

Just some dirty back-of-the-napkin numbers, but theoretically, £100MM doesn't seem unreasonable.

O2 have 25MM direct customers, plus another 7MM through reseller networks — so that's 32MM people directly affected by the outage.

Presuming O2 receives an average of £30 per customer per month (which I think is a reasonable estimate), that's £940MM/month, working out to £32MM per day in a 30-day month.

O2 are refunding customers 2 days' worth of service for the outage, so that would be £64MM in lost revenue.

Add on top of that brand and reputation damage — and other factors I've no doubt forgotten to include — and £100MM doesn't seem unreasonable.

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I think you forgot that O2 won't lose that money because they never refund to their customers. But I might be wrong. So basically the clients lose the money.

Also average monthly can't be so high maybe you're including the device cost as well.

Remember that many might have prepaid and no contracts.

I'm with O2 and was affected, and they have messaged me promising credit of 2 days of my airtime bill.

What does MM mean? Google wasn't able to help.

Millions plural

Just to clarify - MM actually just represents 'million' where a single M represents 'thousand'.

The plural part of your definition here is not really relevant.. i.e. 10M = ten thousand, 10MM = ten million, 1M = 1 thousand (not 1 million, singular)

Most people colloquially seem to use k for 'thousand' and most people would probably intuit M as 'million', but I think people still go with MM for avoidance of doubt.

Never knew this, never seen it in my line of work. Thanks for the clarification.

CPM in advertising. Cost per Mille (per one thousand views).

It's the french system:

10M, ten thousand

10MM, ten million

10MMM, ten billion

here in sec. 3: https://www.druide.com/fr/enquetes/abréviation-de-million-et...

And "M" dates back to the Roman number 1000.

One would think that a metric country would adopt "k"/kilo as the indicator for thousands and "m"/mega for millions.

Still I suppose it's better than sussing out whether someone is British and using "long" billions.

(in most of the world, "billion" = 10 to the 9th power; in older British usage still sometime seen, "billion" = 10 to the 12th power, and 10^9 is "thousand million")

Well they're french, so M stands for Mille (one thousand). MM is just a thousand squared, and MMM is a thousand qubed.

Once you understand this system you might also understand why the long system makes more sense.

  1000                 = Mille     M
  1000 000             = Million   MM
  1000 000 000         = Milliard  MM M
  1000 000 000 000     = Billion   MM MM 
  1000 000 000 000 000 = Billiard  MM MM M

in the short system the billion (nine zeros) has nothing to do with two. while in the long system it represents double as many zeros as the million. a trillion has three times the Zeros. -ard suffix? add 3 zeros

As someone who used to speak decent French, you will never convince me that the language is rational with respect to numbers. The sometimes-decimal/sometimes-vigesimal thing still makes my head spin all these years later when I hear numbers being spoken in French.

"Still I suppose it's better than sussing out whether someone is British and using "long" billions."

Britain does not use "long" billions. Not since the 1970s or so. Now days, billion always means 1000 million.

Many other European languages, on the other hand, do use the long scale.

That’s correct. But when speaking or writing in English, the English conventions should be used.

In the US, UK, and other English-speaking countries, "m" (note lower case) is used for million.

From the Guardian style guide:

"million - in copy use m for sums of money, units or inanimate objects: £10m, 45m tonnes of coal, 30m doses of vaccine; but million for people or animals: 1 million people, 23 million rabbits, etc; use m in headlines"

Presumably there is a considerable amount for reputational damage.

I hadn't considered it when I wrote my earlier comment, but I wouldn't be surprised to see O2 receive their own reputational damage invoices from their reseller networks (O2, Tesco, etc.) in relation to the problems.

No company in the world has a lower reputation than O2. It can't get lower

Only 60GB mobile data plans are £30 or more.

I doubt they would be compensating payment plans for devices.

O2's announced compensation is:

* Two days of an airtime contract (so e.g. if you just pay them £30 per month, that's about £2 in value for you)

* 10% discount on two types of pay-as-you-go payments with no specific limit but expect one to be announced.

The latter in particular you can expect to be heavily abused, because O2 needs the PR. I'd be astonished if that limit is any lower than £100, meaning they're giving away a £10 value.

I have a feeling you need to call and waste a lot of time, so most people won't bother... They won't lose near that much in real life.

No. O2 pay-monthly customers got a text message from them saying the credit will be automatically applied.

For what it's worth, I'm on a 20GB/month mobile data plan with O2 and pay £30/month.

Puts into perspective how many customers don't change their plans when they're able to...

Have you tried calling them up and asking for a better deal? I’m paying £16 a month for 40gb with BT, so surely o2 could give a better deal!

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