Had no O2 coverage in Lyminge today and their status page (and 3's) said they were working on a local mast. O2 3G has come back now, but also a coworker has a Vodafone signal at the office for the first time, they've never covered here before.

At the moment both providers only seem to be doing 3G, the O2 2G signal which we had before today hasn't come back, and no sign of 4G from either, but I guess they could still be working on it.

I remember being able to stream Radio 1 over O2's GPRS without major problems during the day back in 2007!

EDGE is actually decent enough for many things if the operators give enough attention to backhaul and availability to customers depending on how many time slots are on offer. Latency is high but still better than GPRS, and audio streaming at low-ish bitrates (32-48kbps) is pretty robust. It's just a shame that this wasn't in place a decade ago - but the operators needed to get their returns on their 3G licence costs and rolling out EDGE on their 2G networks which can perform nearly as good as basic UMTS speeds was not something they were going to do. In other countries where 3G burdens were less, EDGE was and still is much more freely available from at least one MNO.

Now I have a 4g phone I'm actually impressed at the 4g and 3g coverage o2 has these days. I think in most areas your on one of these now, with 2g appearing at the odd time.

Clealry this is in the areas they have upgraded, however it does bode well as they appear to be doing areas in real detail. I think they could be a real challenger to EE in the future as cornerstone is clearly now starting to take shape.

What's Vodafone got against Llangollen? There has been little to zero coverage for years, on todays visit seems nothing has changed. Good EE 4G though.

O2 coverage should definitely challenge EE but it can't compete on speed. Of course most people don't need such high speeds unless they're mobile broadband users.

If you've got enough bandwidth to stream HD video (and maybe UHD content) then that should cover people for a fair few years.

And UHD will likely be encoded such that it can be streamed at 10Mbps or less when codecs improve. So every network should be fine.

For now I'm assuming O2 as is, not having been bought by Three.

left three for vodafone and got the iphone 6s

must so far vodafone is much better than the signal i was getting with three....sometimes i would get no signal in my house until midday and when there was signal...4g was very slow.
With Vodafone however...the internet is blistering fast on my iphone...

its early days but so far I am not regretting the move on bit!

If manufacturers and content providers get there act together anytime soon and start supporting something like X265 HEVC then this could easily be done, you can get a great quality HD video at only 700-900kbps with this format.


You finally made up your mind and moved! Well done

O2 4G is now live from their mast at Etchinghill, after they added Vodafone to it for the first time ever yesterday. Speedtest at home gives 32Mb down, 19Mb up, with my S6 showing 2 bars of signal.

^^that's a big mast 40m or more should cover a wide area for both o2 and Voda

It is, it covered a big area around the Elham Valley for O2, EE and Three already, but Vodafone have always had a big hole in their coverage here.

O2 put in planning a while back to replace their aerials and Vodafone have shown it coming for over a year on their coverage map. All the networks have been on an off the last few weeks, so I guess they've been working on it.

Same thing it has against here I'd suspect. O2 has been poor for many years, and is patently in no hurry to change that, but Vodafone has the dubious honour of being the only network whose coverage is actually going backwards.

On the other hand; Three's 3G is pretty much everywhere, while EE's 4G blows O2 and Vodafone's 2G out of the water, which pretty much says it all.

I tested one of Vodafone's monopoles with two phones speed testing and weirdness happened. With one phone, I got 72/25, with two phones speed testing, each got only 36/13. On Vodafone's blog recently, they said "If you put a pipe into it that’s 100 Mbps for instance, and its users are all using 2 mbps, you can only serve 50 users. So in densely populated areas like Portsmouth, these sites will only cover around half a mile in radius as we like to have a bit of an overlap to ensure customers always get great coverage.”"http://blog.vodafone.co.uk/2015/10/14/4g-in-portsmouth-inside-the-hidden-signal-battles-being-fought-on-your-doorstep/ The sceptic in me can't help but feel that he did not choose the 100mbps by accident.

Can anyone speak from experience how long (roughly obviously) a Cornerstone mast, from planning approved, might start to go live? One beside my house has been approved just 2 days ago, very exciting!

A mast nearby got approved in April, no sign of upgrade yet.

Anything from 18months to 1 month, going on past experience. It will happen though now at some point.

I still don't see any real evidence down here in the SW that VOD are infilling anywhere. They are converting all the 3G areas to 4G which is nice but there are massive swathes of Devon and Cornwall which would look pretty embarrassing on their map if they actually showed true 3/4G coverage and didn't accidentally put 2G on as well. There must be thousands of tourists every year who come to the South Hams and there is virtually no data coverage at all. It's pathetic and all the updates we get are 'wooo, bodmin going live' etc.

I guess those tourists just think there is no data down here as we are all pasty munchers so that's that when they could be burning gigabytes on EE or 3 in most places.

I think you have answered your own question lol

I know of several 2G vod sites that will be upgraded soon to 4G it's definitely not just existing 3G areas that are being done. Padstow should be live soon also Falmouth and a couple of sites along the A30 and A39

The fastest I've seen is about Three months where is the mast I'll keep a look out

Surely they have more than 100mbps backhaul though, surely?

Bearing in mind most of their network down here is GPRS, 100Mbps sounds light lightening!
Perhaps the guy had accidentally gone back in time to 1998 where 2Mbps to 50 people would have been like Star Trek or something.
Perhaps Vodafone are suffering a glitch in the Matrix where they sometimes go back in time by mistake AND it causes their 3G coverage to show up as 2G on the map!!
I might go on Twitter and mention their bullshit might be a glitch in the matrix!

Here is their South Devon 3G coverage 2015.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/qn8gmxut9a3lpbn/3G.JPG?dl=0
Remember that glitch has accidentally caused them to inexplicably include 2G in the 3G coverage because that makes no sense at all, so we are looking at the purple areas.
The black boundary is roughly where I work.
15 years they've had. They clearly don't care about us down here. They might as well get rid of the colours and just put "we don't care about you, shove off".
Pathetic!

They could have rolled out good backhaul and 3G2100 UK wide, same as EE.
With that as a base network they could have then rolled out 20/35Mhz 2600 UK wide which at a higher power would have been better than EE's current low power 1800.
Ok it might not have quite stretched so far but where you had 4G it would have been awesome and there would be great 3G to fall back to.
Then, roll out 10Mhz 800 at full power to VoLTE phones only and hey presto, a great network.

Instead we have low power 800 running on top of crap 3G900 that only works for voice and I see no way anytime soon they can get that 800 to full coverage potential.
They can't lock it to VoLTE phones only so it's doomed to stay within 3G900's minimum coverage footprint which is considerably less than 2G's

In summary, by not rolling out a decent proper 3G2100 network, they have completely screwed themselves over.
Amazing!
Rant over.

Hi just sat in McDonalds Kings Cross and I have to say I'm enjoying a very usable 4G800 with full strength signal currently get 5mb down same up. Not bad for 18:30 in such an area, partner on 3 and 3/4G is crippled!

No Vodafone map update today. Hmm.

My local one had planning approved in July 2013. First work that caused service disruption was a few weeks ago and O2 4G went live this week. So thats 27 months.

This wasn't a normal one though, it had never had Vodafone on it at all before. Also the mast belongs to BT and is used by the other mobile companies and others too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolsford_Hill_BT_Tower

^^any sign of Voda 4G from it yet??