"Mobile phone operators have struck a deal with the government to fill in partial gaps in mobile coverage in a move intended to give 90 per cent geographical cover from the four big networks by 2017....

Sajid Javid, the culture secretary, said the agreement would not cost the government any money for the moment. But he dropped a heavy hint that the regulator might cut the annual licence fee that operators pay in future.

Mr Javid said there would be a guaranteed £5bn investment in the UK’s mobile infrastructure, including the construction of masts or investment in new technology.
Under the agreement, the four networks have collectively agreed to £5bn of investment by 2017, and guaranteed voice and text coverage across 90 per cent of the UK by the same year.

It will mean that full coverage from all four operators will increase from 69 per cent to 85 per cent, providing more reliable signal strength.
Mr Javid said the deal would be made legally binding through amended licence conditions to be enforced by the regulator Ofcom, but added that the operators might be compensated in future licence rounds."

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/0fdb2f9a-8...44feabdc0.html
http://www.theguardian.com/business/...al-sajid-javid

90%? I thought operators talked about 98 or 99%? Unsurprising to see this is the route they're going down rather than national roaming.

Someone on the Guardian tried to claim the networks had stumped the cash up, I assume it's a kind donation from the government...

They are talking about geographical coverage now. Normally they talk about the population coverage, when they mention 98%.

It's going be 85% Geographical mix of 3G/4G and the last 5% 2G I believe as the 90% margin is for calls and texts but not data the 85% is for that. Though even 85% geographical is likely to be close to 99% indoor coverage if not above.

seems fairly sensible. thank god the idea of national roaming has been shelved!

From the Telegraph article

“We should require companies to engage in national roaming – fully sharing existing and future phone masts.”

Why does this prohibit networks from sharing masts even if they don't have roaming - or is it just bad journalism? The mast behind my parents house has been one carrying multiple networks for getting on two decades now (joint Cellnet, Orange, and One2One when it was installed - since then Three has been added and Vodafone remains absent).

I'd have thought in these rural areas it would have made sense for what is effectively two networks now (Vodafone/O2 and EE/Three) to have shared masts in these areas.

You'd have thought so. But obviously not.

My parents village is covered by a shared EE/Three/O2 site about a mile away and a lone Vodafone site in the village. The only problem is that because of the geography of the area, the shared site a mile away does not manage to give indoor coverage to around half of the village (outdoor coverage is just about fine). If the lone site in the village could be shared, then that would essentially solve all indoor coverage problems in the village. But as the current situation has been exactly the same for the last ten years, I can't see anything changing.

Depends which part of county is it if it's in the part that Vodafone are upgrading O2 will eventually be on the Vodafone mast.

Fingers crossed as part of Beacon O2/VF retain and use the VF site if not both!

Maybe I am just being cynical, but I have a feeling they will just add VF to the current O2 mast and decommission the current VF mast.

Not that either helps me anyway as I am currently with Three and looking to move to EE once my contract finishes. At least I'm living elsewhere now so I only have to deal with that rubbish situation every now and again.

Depends on the leasing of the two sites. VF must be landlord of their own site - the other could be O2 or MBNL as landlord, If it's MBNL it could be cheaper for beacon to use the VF site (owned within beacon group) and decomm the other. If the shared site is O2 owned and they gain rental revenue from MBNL they would likely keep that one.

It's not always as clear cut as pick a of b!

Very true that sadly things like this aren't as clear cut as they appear.

http://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php...verage-90.html

I wonder how bad those figures are when you look at indoor coverage!
In my experience, outdoor coverage seems pretty good most of the time. It is indoor coverage that really needs the kick up the backside IMO.

Here's a quick summary from Ofcom's most recent published coverage percentages which show this for 2G and 3G. Unfortunately there is no breakdown for 4G in the Oct 2014 numbers (2G and 3G are for June 2014). Ofcom use premises percentage which is very similar to population percentage. It's also good that they are talking more about geographical coverage now.

These numbers are better than the ones the networks produce because the same signal thresholds are applied across networks. When networks quote their own numbers they each use different thresholds so are not directly comparable.

http://i.imgur.com/10ned39.png

Vodafone and O2 are shockingly poor.

Looks like Three has more than double the geographic data coverage over Vodafone.

Just shows you that your population coverage can look ok but in reality go out of the city and 3G just disappears on Voda/O2.

EE are covering many a village with 4G where O2/Voda have never had 3G or anything other than GPRS!

Indeed and I hope we see more geographical coverage figures being quoted. Population/premises percentages are okay in the early stages of a rollout but after a certain level it's far more enlightening to know geographic coverage. Not sure what has suddenly sparked the interest but it's great to see this new agreement is based on geographic coverage.

Well clearly the operators went to the Govt and said look we have nearly 100% coverage and the Govt said B*ll***s!

I expect Ofcom to quote Geo stats from now on.

O2 has some chance of salvage, but Vodafone is beyond repair.

EE and Three are miles ahead.

The difference in geographical coverage between EE and 3 for 3G seems interesting, are there really that many ex T-Orange sites that have not been MBNLed? (and since it doesn't change the premises percentage, they're either there for extra capacity or cover the middle of nowhere?)

The main benefit is extra coverage of roads (EE 3G coverage is 5pp higher than Three 3G for A & B roads).

Three have around 15.4k 3G sites of which 13k+ are DC enabled and 2.5k are 4G enabled.
EE have over 18k

Someone correct me if I'm wrong about EE.

I've got an interesting question not sure if anyone knows this but the 90% obviously doesn't include data but only SMS and Voice coverage has the government added an amendment to make sure that the networks use LTE on all sites. Else when 2G/3G gets shut down we will lose that 5% and go back to 85% Geographical. SMS is already possible by 4G on all networks and imagine by end of 2017 all networks will have commerically launched VoLTE.

Just an interesting thought I had I hope the government has thought about this. It would be cheaper for the networks not to install LTE on the masts hope that was considered when this deal was reached.