Originally Posted by Pedro_C:
“3G900 can be perfectly adequate for large areas. There's a large 30-40m mast near me that carries Voda/O2 900/900/800 and the 3G speeds are perfectly good despite the fact it covers part of a reasonable sized town and a large amount of almost rural housing. OK, a lot of devices will be on 4G800, but the 900 3G extends quite a bit further and speeds are still pretty good: the sector that covers the rural housing often achieves 12mbps, the town part 3-4mbps.”
Vodafone's 3g 900mhz works OK when there is 4g on the same mast or near by as there is something else to take some else to take some of the load.
What seems to happen when masts only have 3g 900mhz & 2100mhz and not 800mhz 4g around is users very quickly fall off the faster 2100mhz service and onto the 900mhz 3g, it doesn't take much for this to happen, where as the likes of three & EE have nothing else to go to they will hang on to the weaker 2100mhz until it's gone completely.
900mhz would be great if there was more spectrum behind it.
But on its own it struggles. A more dense 3g network would help matters immensely too.
I think by the end of this year, in most parts of England at least we should have a thin coverage of 3g and 4g in parts of most towns and cities, but unless some miracle movement happens on the old rural masts it will be many years until it's blanket coverage with any substantial depth.
Just look how many orange masts EE still has to do, and how long Devon has had to wait for things to happen on his one rural mast..
We going to be taking about this until at least 2018..