Well now I notice they have a new £11 SO 2gb offer for 18months. Looks a great deal but also smells fishy as its cheap for long tie in.

O2 4G finally up in running in my area, What I like about this is the pay as you go customers seem to be stuck on 3G meaning 4G is not oversubscribed. On 3G we were lucky to get 0.5mb, now on 4G its around 16-18mb which is decent enough.

Yeah I very rarely get more than about 20Mbps down on O2. I've once got 50 but only once.

Which 2 are left round Wakefield Skippy? Thank you

It says for my postcode " were working on 3G mast in your area " makes me laugh there's only one 2G mast here next mast is 4 miles away and that's 2G as well only 3G is city of Gloucester 7 miles away!

Maybe that is an o2 mast they are working on?

What's your postcode?

I see the community "champion" is still misleading people...

The one on top of the police building at the war memorial (Rishworth st) across from country hall. A lattice tower beside the railway tracks at B&M, Matalan. It has two short fat antennas and a short slim on it, no dishes etc....


My mistake there is another site so 3, on top of Wakefield house behind trinity walk, o2 has a site which hasn't been done yet, although I've seen some people up there later. Could be 3, as the newly upgraded 3 site up there is offline due a fault and will be for quite a while so I'm told.

Gotta say, when you have 900MHz on all the masts a long a road, the coverage just goes on and on.

You could say the same for any frequency, if you have 2600Mhz on all the masts along a road the coverage would just go on and on .

It's when you don't have masts that coverage becomes a problem .

Or if you space your masts too far apart, which is what O2 have done from Higham Ferrers through to Raunds along the A45...

All operators use the same location for their Higham Ferrers masts - all operators have 3G2100.

MBNL and Vodafone use a good location for their masts - just on the outskirts of Raunds village. MBNL is 3G2100, Voda is 2G900 only (why?!)

However, O2 also use 3G2100 for Raunds; though their mast is situated about half a mile away from the village, the other side of the BP petrol Station at Raunds. As such, there are coverage gaps along there, due to 3G2100 not having enough of a reach.

If you're going to use 3G2100 (or 2G1800/4G1800, particularly for EE/Three) then make sure your masts are close enough together, or the power is turned up enough.

And anyway, seeing as most people have smartphones these days, I'd have thought that 3G would be seen as a minimum coverage spec for all networks...

Hopefully with CTIL the O2 coverage will improve shortly

CTIL need to come along and upgrade both masts - the O2 mast could do with 3G900 for coverage across from Raunds to the Thrapston area, and the Vodafone mast really needs upgrading in order to give Raunds some decent 3G/4G coverage indoors and outdoors.

Btw, I have got a Giffgaff SIM that I can use to test out the O2 network, and I'll have to try and get a Vodafone SIM somehow, to test their network.

With giffgaff, 4mbps on 4G is roughly equivalent to 50mbps of actual speed from mast.
3mbps on 3G is roughly 32mbps.
0.2mbps on 3G is roughly equal to 2mbps real.
2G speeds seem to roughly replicate real.
So basically multiply the giffgaff downlink speed by 10 and you'll be roughly looking at what an O2 contract can do.

With 3G there's no point turning the volume up as this would just cause more interference and everything would grind to a halt. That's why 3G is so pants compared to 2G for coverage. 2G is fixed coverage, 3G is variable. Power levels are dynamically adjusted between adjacent cells depending on loading. Turning the power up would break it!


Yes but O2 have 27 quadrillion 2G customers and only 14 customers have a smartphone so 3G2100 ain't their main priority.

I never saw that in a lot of testing last year, we tested using o2, Tesco, Lyca and Giffgaff sims and the differences were nowhere near 10 times.

From memory, o2 was around 12-15, Tesco around 10-12, Lyca was 6-8 and Giffgaff around 2-4Mbps.

Even on 3G, Giffgaff was around 1Mbps and o2 was 7-8Mbps (I can't remember the Tesco and Lyca speeds on 3G).

My phone today had 3-4 bars of VOD 2G900 in a traditional Devon bunker vs. zero bars of 3 3G from the same mast. Get 800 out boys. It's the answer.

You know it. Turn it on.

Same where I work, which was one reason I switched to Vodafone in the end, full bars -80db 3g 900mhz inside yet if I force my phone to 2100mhz it barely gets 1 bar and is unusable, same when on three. Sadly Vodafone seem reluctant to add 4g to this big 35 metre mast yet despite amazing backhaul giving 10mbps 3g 900mhz in quite times and 24mbps 2100mhz 3g at all times of the day, preferring to upgrade some smaller out of town masts 1st..

A big mast in Yeovil is being upgraded this week is a whooper about 40m

Yes with those tall masts 900MHz coverage is brilliant, especially when travelling I've found.

Vodafone 4G now live in Padstow and surrounding area

Was there actually a 3 3G signal (albeit very weak) or was the 3 3G totally absent? In my opinion, 0 bars (-111/-113 dBm) of 3G (particularly 3G2100) is preferable to even -59dBm (full strength) 2G, because 2G is limited to 220k tops (55k if it's GPRS), but -111dBm MBNL 3G can still provide up to 3Mbps, depending on the mast.

And I know what I'd rather have

I can never get throughout at below -105dBm on 3 3G. What you'll want to look at is the ASU as that will tell you if the connection can actually be used for anything.

Yeah in my experience EE3G is a bit pointless from -105 to -110.
No way it would ever work at -111.
My Huawei router use to connect at between -99 and -102dBm and when at 102 it would get very dodgy and intermittent.
In complete contrast I can put it in the kitchen where no phone will show 2G1800 let alone 4G1800 and it will pull in -124dBm 4G1800 and do about 8 meg down and 0.5 up!!!
Bonkers.