In my area of north Hampshire, Vodafone is looking to massively reduce its 3G coverage over the next three months!

Work have just given me a phone. Got O2 service and a BB Classic, so 4G should be possible. At home, in an area fully covered by EE and Three 4G, O2 is giving me GPRS. This is why I left them as my personal provider three years ago. It's not like I live in the middle of nowhere. O2 are very poor on 4G coverage so far.

Well interesting as I took a look on roadworks tonight and an area that VF installed all the ducting and fibre to, months ago, is down for a complete removal and reinstall of the mast in 3 weeks time ...so maybe it is all staged so that map can keep coming and going as work is done bit by bit on the masts in question.

This is congestion:

http://imgur.com/Xz83q7C,lHXHu50#1
http://imgur.com/Xz83q7C,lHXHu50#0

The first one is at Kings Cross and has been like that for over a month now, the second one is in Victoria station. I know these are both busy areas, but really? The average speed I seem to get in London at the moment on 4G is ~3Mbps.

If its radio congestion then voda may have run out of space on the 2x10 800mhz they've allocated to that area - maybe they will be deploying 2600 shortly. Does your phone support 2600?

Yeah it's an iPhone 6 Plus. In field test mode I have only ever seen it connect to 800Mhz at Kings Cross. Hopefully they put 2.6Ghz in soon - I can't really understand why they didn't do it already. Presumably they're able to see the increasing amounts of data going through the masts there and could project when the network was going to come to a standstill. Failing that if you just guessed which areas of London might get busy train stations would probably be on the list! The network is still extremely slow at KX even at off-peak times though.

I worry a bit they won't do anything, since their 3G network ended up being pretty unusable in central London for about a year before they did their network refresh for 4G, and they even said on Watchdog people would just have to wait for 4G! This despite the fact 3 in particular had a perfectly useable 3G network without 4G (EE had good 3G too but started shifting traffic to 4G), so I have no doubt Voda could have sorted things (by which I mean improving network capacity alongside demand) without having to wait for 4G but just didn't want to spend the cash.

800 is going to give them the most theoretical coverage which is probably all they worry about right now. I suspect infill will come later. It's like 3G900 on O2. Lots of coverage, lots of bars but no data. But they can fill it in on the map as job done.

Funny you mention Victoria as i got my fastest ever speed @99mbps on a cat 4 handset out side the station using 2600mhz

This is what I worry about, that they won't bother fixing it. To be honest it's pretty worrying it's got this congested given how low the number of 4G subscribers they have.


My iPhone 6 Plus is supposedly category 4 but I've never got more than about 50Mbps on it, even on 2.6Ghz. To be fair the speed test was in the station while on the train waiting for it to leave, and as the station is covered by buildings this probably messes up the signal. But since this is the second busiest train station in the country, you'd expect Vodafone to invest the money to make their network actually work there.

A big difference I've noticed between EE and Vodafone is that EE went out of its way to cover airports early, presumably with picocells as the coverage maps would show airports completely covered but the surrounding area without 4G (just a few years ago in Heathrow T1 domestic departures I saw a picocell on the wall with a One2One sticker on it!). My guess is Vodafone relies on coverage from outside getting into the airport - I used to go through Gatwick twice a month and hardly ever got 4G there despite Vodafone showing it as covered by 4G on their coverage checker. On EE, I hardly ever got anything other than full bars of 4G. Back in May I flew through Standsted and Vodafone had no 4G at all. Although I live in London, I stayed the night before as my flight was at 6am and although I didn't get to the airport until about 11pm (and the train station and hotel were very quiet) the Vodafone 3G network was struggling with sub-1Mbps speeds. It was worse the next day (the airport was heaving even at 6am - it's a Ryanair hub afterall!), and when I got back on the weekend (presumably peak time for the airport) data would not work on my phone at all until I was well away from the airport on the Stansted Express. According to the Vodafone coverage map, Stansted still doesn't have 4G with no planned improvements to the network. It's crazy given this is the UK's 4th busiest airport nearly two years after Vodafone first launched their 4G network. Two years!! You'd think embarrassment alone would spur them to do better, but apparently not.

Looking through my iPhone on Carrier 20.5.3 I can see in the PDP Context, which is the list of active APNs as far as I know I can see "ims" as an active APN without an IP address. Will this be preparation for VoLTE or something else that's just on the normal stuff.

They're very poor on 3G too it seems

Fixed that for you

In fairness now I know what people mean about constant changing map. Now the vf one has changed again for my area, 4g gone and even more interesting 3g getting worse as well.

Thanks, but I've been to a few areas so far, and I've yet to see 4G once. The best I've seen is H+.

Sorry, i couldn't resist.

I get O2 4G at work & home but it's always quite congested (in places) in the city. But saying that i just did a speed test and got 21 down and 17 up so it's not too bad today.

It's good where i live but i feel that this is my last year with O2 due to them being utter shit and undependable in places plus with the Three buyout, i dont want nothing to do with them liars.

The problem for me is that their map says there's coverage where there isn't, and at work, where it claims to be H+ I'm getting less than 2 down. That's on supposedly 5 bars of signal.

My Three phone, sat next to it on the desk with only 2 bars of signal gets 11 down. The disparity in service is even more drastic at home where O2's GPRS gets less than 1mbps down, where Three has 4G and gets between 35-45 mbps down and around 15 up.

Three are not, by any stretch of the imagination, perfect, and the 4G coverage is relatively new, but my point is that despite O2 now having 4G in some places, they're still offering woeful GPRS in far too many places. It's 2015 for goodness sake. GPRS should be a fallback data service in places only populated by hikers and sheep, not just outside the M25!

To be fair to O2, things are improving - you will still see GPRS in areas they haven't got to you. Replacing the entire network and adding in additional ex-Voda sites is a 4 year programme. You can't expect them to completely replace equipment, add new cabinets and replace antennas and cabling on around 15000 masts overnight!

They should have done this by now though. Yes they're catching up now. But when you look at EE and Three in terms of 3g coverage, why are they so far behind?

Because they built a phone network that works ...and I suspect it does work from a marketing point of view as well.

For example, in the non forum world people talk about 3 being rubbish because of poor coverage and the same for EE indoors. Yet they seem to think o2 / vf work everywhere ..so is that proof that most people just like to see a signal of any type?

Maybe things are changing these days but as long as a user can call and text it appears that they will put up with poor data coverage.

It's like EE how do they get away with such high prices?

How does three get away with such shocking customer service?

All valid questions yet somehow the customers have loyalty to each of the brands. What is now clear more than ever, that one network isn't good, everywhere so your choice has to be based on your needs of your phone.

But, the question is WHY haven't they got to these areas yet. Three have been woefully slow in their roll-out of 4G, and yet they have managed it.

As I said, I was with O2 for a few years and I travelled around the country regularly. Anywhere outside of a town centre was GPRS only, and also on train routes, motorways etc. I'm just shocked that three years later, that situation doesn't seem to have improved.

I've got a builder around doing some work downstairs and he's just called up to ask if I have Wi-Fi because he can't download an important email he needs.

I gave him the code but also asked what network he was on. O2! So I looked at his iPhone and saw O2 GPRS. And he couldn't get data to work at all.

I didn't feel like saying that if he was on EE he could be getting 90Mbps on 4G (as I'm currently getting on my free 100GB SIM), or nearer 20-25Mbps on Three.

And I'm just off a major business park in Hatfield (comprising EE's HQ), not the middle of nowhere.

I am not sure how clued up the builder is on what 2G/3G/4G is, but suspect he was confused that he had a signal but couldn't access email, and by giving him Wi-Fi access he doesn't need to know I suppose!

Looks like 900MHz 3G is live in Alton on O2. Getting an excellent signal inside M&S!

Shame O2 speeds (1Mb) are so slow

O2 still have mediocre 4G on the M3 and GPRS on some of it!

o2 "4G" in Newcastle...

http://i.imgur.com/TNDsXRl.png

Doesn't time fly! I didn't realise it was 2017 already!! They still have a couple of years to go and somewhere has to be towards the end of the programme! Three tend to be activating one of two masts in an area where O2/Voda are upgrading most of the sites which will give deeper coverage.