O2 (UK) congestion. BT Cellnet launched the world's first GPRS network on 22 June 2000, although GPRS-enabled devices were uncommon at that time. O2 publicly announced on 15 December 2009 that it had successfully demonstrated a 4G connection using LTE technology installed in six masts in Slough. The technology, which was supplied by Huawei, achieved a peak downlink rate of 150 Mbps. In January 2012, the company announced plans to provide free internet to millions of residents and visitors in central London, by launching Europe's largest free Wi-Fi zone, along with free Wi-Fi access for anyone on any network in and around
O2 (UK) 2016, the European Commission officially blocked the tie-up of O2 and Three, arguing that the merger would reduce consumer choice and lead to a higher cost of services. In September 2016, Telefónica appointed a number of investment banks to sell the business to investors, ahead of a stock market flotation. On 6 December 2018, a major disruption to the O2 network, caused by faulty software, left up to 32 million users (including those on MVNOs) without access to data services (on both 3G and 4G) for up to 24 hours. During the outage, some voice and text services suffered from