Travelling from Scotland to southern England I've noticed how much more 3G coverage my wife gets on Three network than I do on O2. Even here in rural Dorset she has coverage and I don't. But even more suprising was on M6 just north of Manchester she had coverage and I didn't.

Is Three particularly good for 3G or is O2 bad.

About to upgrade my phone and am now seriously thinking of changing networks.

No point having a smartphone if there limited 3G coverage.

The answer to your question is both. O2 3g coverage is sh** and 3 3g coverage is great. The only drawback is that 3 don't have any fallback 2g coverage any more as they cancelled their orange agreement.

A good compromise is t-mobile which has the same 3g coverage as 3 but also has good 2g fallback. The throughput speeds a little poorer though. Also, t-mobile coverage is about to drastically improve as well. They are my recommendation .

I agree with Paulkers comments, although T-mob packages aren't as good in my opinion, neither are the allowances and the fallback is often not needed, especially as the 3G coverage keeps growing. Also Three will be able to take advantage of Orange 3G cells too, who needs 2G when 3G allows you to talk, text and get high speed data and when the coverage is getting as good as it is.

I was in the depths of Wales travelling to Pontypool / Panteg through all the hills and valleys on the way there and back streaming 3G with no issues and amazing coverage yesterday.

This is proving a complete pain in the neck for me. Finding myself without any signal too often around here at the moment.

I'm only PAYG. If T-Mobile offered a flat £5 fee for unlimited internet I'd be off in a shot.

£5 for unlimited internet

So you want great 3G coverage, 2G backup service and unlimited internet and you're only willing to pay a fiver. That's not going to happen. Your expectations are far too high, you need to be more realistic.

Quoted for truth. Where I am and for some considerable distance around O2's 3G is, quite frankly, shameful when compared to Three's 3G.

As for 2G fallback onto Orange's network it is currently still available in some areas, it's available here anyway I know - goodness knows why, Three's 3G signal tramples all over it in all respects. Nevertheless the 2G fallback is still there if needs be, although to be honest the last time I used it was about four months ago.

Im on O2 and their 3G reception is appalling, patchy and slow.

O2 claim to be spending £1 million a day improving their network, if anything its getting worse even 2G

And I've heard people who know about the telecoms industry state that people should be paying a minimum of £85 a month for landline unlimited Internet, never mind mobile Internet, in order for it to be financially viable and for continual investment to be done!

Still, I get truly unlimited Internet on my phone for £10 a month from a company with substantial financial backing. Horses for courses really, if it isn't that sustainable, they'll pull it, significantly increase prices and put it out of the reach of the ordinary person.

There's no O2 3G coverage within 20 miles of here in any direction. I couldn't believe it when an acquaintance got a Three 3G dongle for their laptop and found it was faster than ADSL. I went straight to the coverage maps to check it out and the difference was shocking, O2 3G coverage is **** all, Three is almost as good as 2G.

Every network has better 3G coverage than O2, theirs is abysmal. Ever wondered why O2 don't let you zoom out very far to see a wide area on their 3G coverage checker compared to 2G?

Yeah I noticed they won't let you zoom out, this is why:

http://oi56.tinypic.com/14b5eew.jpg

Admittedly 2 years old, but the coverage map today when zoomed in doesn't show a great deal of improvement. Most of the upgrades have been in the main cities like London, Birmingham, Leeds etc for capacity, not for more geographic coverage.

That's not the Ofcom map, I was very bored 1 night a year ago and I used the snipping tool and zoomed out as far as you could in each grid, pieced them all together and then shrunk the picture so you could see it overall. That is what the O2 3G map looks like zoomed out.

Yeah, they spout figures like 95% (population) coverage, but in reality its more like 5% (geographic) coverage.


And the consequence of this is that people who live in cities buy 3G phones on O2 and then travel into the countryside and overload the 2G network. 2G data on O2 effectively doesn't work now outside of 3G coverage areas. I've only been able to get 2G data once in the last few months and it was at 7:00 on a Sunday morning!

I phrased that badly. I meant mobile (phone) internet .

Three have a notionally 'no limits' add on with a monthly fee of £5 for mobile internet. Obviously there is some sort of FUP, but its more than enough for my smartphone use. It was possible to put the SIM into a USB dongle for PC use too, but I'd imagine that's not the case now.

Anyway I digress, Three used to have 2G fallback but its not as good now, hence my comment I'd go to T-Mobile if they offered the same kind of deal on mobile internet..