Thanks for this Pedro, I knew you would know this :P how long I wonder before they remove the old Vodafone panels? surely they won't stay?

Well, another low for Vodafone, I managed to drive nearly 30 miles along the A53 from market Drayton to the outskirts Shrewsbury without a single hint of signal 2g,3g or 4g, three had 4g 800mhz albeit weak 1mbps speeds and 3g all the way, EE was 3g/4g all the way and strongest of all was O2 if only 2g most the way, this is nothing new but FFS! Sort it out! What's the point of a cornerstone agreement if you never intend to use any O2 sites, it's the same story on the A519 from Newport in Shropshire until you virtually reach Newcastle Under Lyme, only the briefest of signals of any type along the whole journey... Theres been now visible urban upgrades for over 8 months in this area now and no rural upgrades at all..
Very poor..
Sites just randomly appear and vanish on the Vodafone predicted coverage planner seemingly for the fun of it, have a feeling I'm going to be climbing the walls, desperate to sign with anyone else by the time my contract is up next year at this rate.

The old panels may well remain semi indefinitely. The riggers are better spent using the time taken to remove the old panels, upgrading another site.

From my testing, the coverage is reasonable but the lack of capacity is really starting to show. With the amount of CA EE and O2 have in the area, it's evident that 2x10MHz of spectrum deployed really isn't enough around here.

For Voda to do L26 or L21 here, they'd need to go around and replace panels, feeders, RRUs, and BTS on all of the sites whereas O2 can do L18 just by changing some settings on the radio. On the other hand, there is a recently upgraded CTIL site in an EE L26 area but for whatever reason, they didn't make it L21/L26 capable.

Most of CTIL's sites are MW from the main exchange for the city which houses equipment for various ISPs now and the fibre ones are usually MS3 or CityFibre so it's not like fibre backhaul should be a problem.

In the city centre, there are places with one bar on Vodafone. No other network has this issue.

On the A1, Vodafone is also terrible. EE has 3G/4G the whole way.

Surely though, if O2 can do L18 quite nicely, then why can't Vodafone also deploy L18 in the area, for 15MHz 4G capacity if CA'd? I know that 5MHz of L18 isn't great, but 15MHz total is better than 10MHz, right? Then when Vodafone want to invest more in their network, they can add L21/L26, meaning that they'd then have L08/L18/L21/L26, and a huge amount of capacity for their users.

Thought that most of the backhaul would be micro, but if micro and fiber is in place that shouldn't be an issue, like you said. VF need to deploy more spectrum to the area!

Voda L21 should be easy too as they already have U21 so surely only a diplexer is required seems funny how all the L26 is on voda controled sites and all o2 L18 is on o2 ones

Most 2100MHz radios can't do more than 20MHz so with O2's 10MHz of U21, Voda could only either do 5 of U21 and 5 of L21, or 10 of L21 and no U21. On Voda's side of the country, O2 and Voda tend to have separate 2100MHz radios so it isn't a problem.

It does seem like there is some deliberate set up configuration to favour the lead network. I'm glad voda is doing my area!

Does anybody know the numbers in G-NetTrack on the end of CellID mean which bands?

I think 0 being 800Mhz could be right.. or maybe not If anyone knows it'd really help.

I am in the West and they have upgraded every other site so call coverage was better with less sites as now we have a mix of old and new it is terrible.

Is Vodafone experiencing some network outages today in London ? I took the A501 from Marylebone to Euston today, an area where I normally see fine data speeds of around 10-20 Mbit, but today the network seemed totally overloaded and I was getting speeds of under 0,5 Mbit.

Edit : Just checked the Vodafone coverage checker and there seem to be a massive amount of issues all over that area. Is that normal ?

Vodafone
First digit is sector number, second is 4G band.
-0 is 800MHz.
-4 is 2100MHz
-6 is 1800MHz
-8 is 2600MHz

Thank you! You've said Vodafone, but are these numbers not the same for every network?

Has anyone downloaded the new Ofcom research app? A crowd sourced network test app that just monitors existing usage, so doesn't consume any data on its own (or very little - about 3MB a month it says).

Shows just how much my Vodafone SIM is now sticking on 2G, or 3G. Hardly ever on 4G at home - which is a major step backwards. Goodness knows what they've done recently.

There was a fault. Vodafone said it was fixed and now I have 2G at home indoors and 3G outdoors. Have to walk some way to see 4G and it is about 4-5Mbps!

I know the students have all arrived in Hatfield, but it's quite ridiculous.

Vodafone, 4G coming to..... Shetland lol

No, not at all.
EE 4G
0, 1, 2 =1800MHz
6, 7, 8=2600MHz etc

Never seen a mast that looks like this before!

https://www.google.com/maps/@54.7613...7i13312!8i6656

What on earth have they done that for?

Sweet.

Looks like a standard Jupiter Monopole - however, I have never seen that color scheme on a mobile mast before!

Man.. the police really need to try harder to make their stingray base stations less conspicuous!

O2 mast in Durham if i'm not mistaken!

It was a planning requirement at the time of installation!! Not sure if its been replaced for Beacon yet or not...

A planning requirement? That's the most outlandish monopole I've ever seen!

What if Voda start using 4G900. Are they allowed to? That way 4G900 will be within the 3G900 and only VoLTE capable phones can work