Ah, thanks, Good News !!
Yes, the broadcast mast, that even carries DAB now !

http://tx.mb21.co.uk/gallery/gallerypage.php?txid=1172

I guess it was down to the way they divided up the work. Question is, why is O2 doing things differently?

Probably true, however it's just frustrating as a consumer to get 227Mbps in a residential area in South London, but 0.3Mbps in front of Euston station...

Let's hope that this will change soon !

Do you have any further info on indoor coverage? It will be very interesting to see how this will play out. Any word on Stansted airport? Was there last month and struggled to achieve speeds above 2Mbps anywhere in the airport.

I got this on Vodafone in Glasgow on Friday morning.

http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/i/1852975585

I was in Liverpool yesterday and 4g from o2 is just like a snail in the city centre. I suspect capacity is now more and more of an issue.

Come over to the East and it's a different story altogether!

Agreed, the East has very good 4G from O2

Looking at o2's map the small text at the bottom quotes 01/11/2016.

That post was from 02-02-2014 right back on page 1. I think O2 have changed their map layout since then.

That'd be a good solution, because O2 need some more spectrum and Vodafone seem to be preferring L21 over L18 anyway.

I guess I can't complain at this but I will, it's just the inconsistency, one day it's like this, the next it drops to 3G and I can't stream BBC radio properly.

http://pic.nperf.com/r/79226568-CbazOmlJ.png

Vodafone L18 reported by Pedro on an o2 upgrade area mast. Puts to bed any notion of voda selling their 1800 spectrum to O2.

Great to see Vodafone 4g arrive in the town of Newport in Shropshire today, has been planned on the station road mast for a while now, with only 2g in the centre of town and 3g with a max of 2mbps available previously from a small mast at the edge of town., this is a great boost..

Vodafone, for me, have actually been much better for me vis-a-vis speed/coverage than Giffgaff, my previous provider, happened to be. However, their customer service seems just as bad as it was when I last used them (in the Orange/One2One days). Mucked my bills up for months, and still owe me Spotify charges which were supposed to be free during the first 12 months of the contract, a couple of which date pre-summer!

I've seen the Vodafone and O2 East West disparity come up on here quite a lot, so here is my Vodafone and O2 Masts by Beacon area guide which shows what is used in each area with schematics.

Great article, thanks for sharing.

Hi, I'm new here so don't know if this has been discussed or not before.

I'm on Giffgaff UK and my phone seems to be picking up Band3 and 5MHz.

This seems very strange... I thought O2 (Giffgaff's provider) used Band20? Don't know what the MHz bit means but I have a rough understanding of Band1, Band3 and Band20.

Does the MHz bit indicate speed or frequency, or something?

Thanks in advance if you can explain what all this means!

Giffgaff/O2 use band 20 as their primary 4G layer. Band 3 is added in busy areas eg. Bradford town centre, Leeds city centre, central London etc. 5 MHz is the bandwidth. 5 MHz is not a lot. O2 do not have a lot of spectrum, but they do make good use of what they have.

Thanks for the explanation - that kinda makes sense.
So the reason why I saw band 3 was because O2 thought it was a busy area and would help? Though I'm nowhere near a big town or city, which is why I was surprised I saw Band3 and not Band20.
Aah, so does the bandwidth correspond to the speed/capacity? I ran a speed test and only got about 3.8Mbps down and 1.8Mbps up, so that explains the bandwidth, but those speeds are kinda low for 4G right? I thought 4G was supposed to be faster than that...

Also, seeing as though O2 use Band 3 and Band 20, does the network select the best band for the phone to be on, regarding speed or coverage? Or does it say "go on Band 3 if you can pick it up, otherwise go on Band 20"?

GiffGaff speeds are generally accepted as being slower than what an O2 user will experience, especially during normal hours. 3.8mbps down is a fairly typical speed on GiffGaff during the day. If you test in that area at say 1am, you may well get as much as 35mbps on the 4G 1800MHz on GiffGaff though.

O2 Band 3 is getting deployed in lots of different areas, many of them not really what you would consider at all urban.

Vodafone are now adding 2600 to their monopoles in south east London. I mean beyond the south circular outer London this is good I got well over 100meg

I'd much rather see Vodafone investing more resources into upgrading services in North London... There are many places where you're stuck on 10Mhz of 4G800 and struggle to achieve 1-2Mbps on 4G.

I'd rather see Vodafone investing more resources into upgrading services in the North East... There are many places where you're stuck on E and struggle to achieve any throughput at all.

Yes I agree, but in this case I was referring to Vodafone spending resources on upgrading capacity and that such upgrades might be much much more useful in other areas.

I find it quite ridiculous that in Southern London you can have the whole 3CA, 230Mbps speedtest experience and then once you cross into the O2 area you're stuck on single carrier 4G with 1Mbps speeds.

Plenty of towns in england where you come off the main road, with Vodafone on a weak 4G signal and say 5 to 8 mbps. Then you go indoors and you're time warped back onto the legacy 3G or 2G and you end up with 0.1mbps :-/