On the contrary, O2 has more customers than Vodafone, EE & Three in Northern Ireland combined! Ofcom's last report into the mobile communications market in NI noted O2 as having a 61% market share here, while a report a few years ago said that this was even more dominant in border areas, which I'd probably count my local village and its hinterland as being part of. Indeed, I would say that where I live, nearly everyone is on O2 or an MVNO on it, the few others with a mobile not on O2 almost always on Vodafone. Before the recent 4G upgrade here, O2's status checker was giving warnings for several months about local cell congestion but I didn't seem to have too much bother, even on giffgaff! Switching to Lycamobile has given me a notable speed increase over them.

IIRC there was also a Root Metrics test done in Belfast prior to EE adding 4G coverage to the city where O2 came out on top. A further one on that then put EE into the top slot, but that was when they were the only 4G operator in the city. I'll need to see if any further surveys have been done more recently.

The above post seems awfully familiar...

Your point being?

Just to update my last post, I found the latest figures that were taken in Q1 2014 - O2 actually had a 65% share, up 4% from the previous year, with a 62% share in urban and 69% share in rural NI (up from 58% & 67% the year before).

Links below include share figures for UK as a whole as well as England, Scotland & Wales.

2014 - http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/mar...reland/ni-5.12

2013 - http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/mar...reland/NI-5.11

It just reaffirms the point I'm making that O2 in Northern Ireland has a large customer base and hence likely a large "load" in quite a few parts of it. In spite of this, I've found the network myself to function pretty well.

I would agree with this, also being in N.I I have found that 80% of my friends are on O2, 10% on the likes of Tesco Mobile and the other 10% on EE/Three etc.

I would say the reason for this is back in the day we only had Cellnet & Vodafone, Cellnet had the better coverage, BT then took this over becoming BT Cellnet, as most folk had their landlines with BT BT became a trusted name and I would say a lot just also took mobile with BT for this reason. You then had the likes of Orange, One2One never launched in N.I and Three came much later to the game, So O2 had a much earlier start to the game in N.I and this more infrastructure and also a bigger user base etc.

So you have O2 coverage pretty much everywhere in NI, in the most rural location you have O2 coverage. then you'd have Vodfone, EE and lastly Three in terms of coverage. It should also be noted that before O2 launched 900Mhz 3G their 3G coverage was as bad as Three, Large towns and cities only, 900Mhz really opened things up for O2, the problem now as this thread shows is the large subscriber base on O2 gives dire speeds where as thing fly on the likes of EE with a smaller user base and better infrastructure.

http://www.rootmetrics.com/uk/rsr/belfast

Most recent report, testing period November 2014 where EE, O2 & Vodafone have 4g in the greater Belfast area.
EE top in all categories.

This I would agree with.
Add in the all the free pay and go sims O2 handed out with the free calls and texts to other O2 users, so before the days of data £10 a month top up was all most people spent.
Best not say anything about the Philips pay & go phones half the country were using 20 years ago!!
That's how a market share in NI was built for cellnet, BTCellnet, O2

Now people just won't change, nothing to do with price, performance or coverage

I'm not an O2 fan, but my Cousin has just informed me that he is getting a 4G signal from O2 in Congleton, Cheshire this morning which makes them the first to bring 4G into the Town, and it looks like Vodafone will be a close second (shown as arriving in 3 months)

EE do like to bang their own drum about their 4G roll out, but in Cheshire, its been shite. Referenced by the fact that O2 and possibly Vodafone are well ahead of them in some places, kudos to them where they are.

In the meantime, the Town got removed from Three's 2014 4G list, and EE customer service don't show any date for its arrival. Its not like we even get decent 3G speeds from EE or 3.

With o2 and Vodafone using 800mhz as their main rollout frequency it was only a matter of time that they began to catch them up in some places. In the long run you'll probably get better speeds when EE come to town but it's inevitable that in some places you'll get better coverage than one over the other

Quite probably, but its a case of *when* EE come to Town, they can have the best network in the world, but that's only applicable or relevant if the customer can actually access and use it. Unfortunately their 3G speeds are crap here to, so its not like we have a useable substitute, I think I got around 0.3mbps on the Dan and Phil sim, which is quite probably just as bad as Giff Gaff / O2

I'm not sure if there are technical issues with MBNL here or not, but half of the Town doesn't even have DC-HSDPA on 3G and its 4G roll out seems to have stopped right at the border of the Town, literally. Neither 3 nor EE customer services can't tell me when its likely to happen either, so I guess its not anytime in the coming months.

So far, I have 4G from O2 where I work, but not even 3G available from them where I live. However I have 4G from EE where I live, but their 3G speeds where I work are crap. So, whilst the Ad-hoc "seat of yer pants" mobile network roll out continues, I either need a dual sim phone capable of two 3G / 4G sims or move

Here is a screen shot I took today, at the same time and same location on my previous O2 Speed Test. This was on EE 4G with 1 bar signal. Quite some difference I think you will agree. From 0.25MB on O2 to 30.54MB on EE.

Sounds like no MBNL masts yet so struggling with ancient Orange (france telecom) masts with insufficient backhaul. That might mean getting the fibre network guys (VM / BT) into that area has problems for some reason.

My experience differs - around the turn of the millennium and a couple of years afterwards, my anecdotal evidence suggests that Vodafone was the most popular network at least around my neck of the woods. My own da got a Vodafone PAYG handset for Christmas in 1999, which I used myself on odd occasions if I was out and about. My first mobile phone I got in June 2000 was a Motorola m3788e on the Orange network - this was a bit of a mistake, as although I was warned in the shop that Orange coverage was very weak where I lived, I didn't think it was that bad - turned out that at best I could get 1 bar of signal on my bedroom windowsill and that was it! Moved up to Belfast for university and in general, among the students I knew Vodafone was the most popular, followed by Orange with BT Cellnet a distant third. Orange was popular with students because of the good value of their PAYG deals and the likes of the Everyday 50 tariff, even though they (and me) soon learned that coverage was very poor in rural areas and even in more urban areas it could still be quite spotty. BT Cellnet was starting to slowly gain some custom I noticed by around the end of 2001, but Voda was still king.

Where I think the worm turned for O2 becoming so popular was when they started sending free sims out that gave you free text & wap/gprs for topping up £10 (a hangover from the days of BT Cellnet's 'Genie' MVNO before O2 was spun off, hence these were often nicknamed 'Genie sims') about a decade ago, and in my own village I was perhaps partly responsible for that - I did a deal with a local newsagent to stock up on these sims to sell for a fiver each and one Christmas we made an absolute killing! Nevertheless this was replicated in a lot of areas, and the offers of cheap/free on-net calls convinced people to go on O2 for the benefit of everyone in their social circles where it could be done. Vondafone suddenly got turned over, and O2 became the new popular network - a tag it still relentlessly holds in most of Northern Ireland. There are still today exceptions to this in places where O2 was weak or non-existent and one other network was the more dominant in that local village or area.

Orange IIRC launched their network in NI in 1998(?) but they had significant coverage problems that meant it didn't match Vodafone and O2 in most places especially for indoor use, and over 15 years later it still struggles with that tag a bit. They did roll out additional cell sites to improve coverage in many areas around 2004 (a spare phone that had my old Orange sim in it I was shocked to discover could be used at the bedroom desk and not just at the windowsill!) But except for maybe some extra micro and nano cells that was the end of their coverage extension until the MBNL upgrade.

One2One did actually "launch" in Northern Ireland in around Spring 2002 (I remember their adverts) just shortly before they became T-Mobile UK, though they did have "unofficial" coverage in Belfast presumably for those visiting from Britain for business or pleasure in the city, but by that point they were late into the game here and struggled to gain any share - I don't think their share of the NI ever went above 2%? It was definitely not helped by not having any high-street presence even in Belfast (relying on the like of F4U & CPW to shrill them), having a 2G network that was often seen as a joke locally and which was reputed to have been built using cell equipment that had been uprooted from Britain (and hence reducing reliability of coverage in those places)! Its 3G service made a bare bones attempt at covering Belfast city centre and that was it. It pretty much limped along until it was originally "closed" down in April 2012. It has come back into existence somewhat on some handsets due to EE using T-Mobile's old network code (234-33) that's a legacy hangover.



O2's 2G coverage supposedly covers about 94% of the population in Northern Ireland. There are places where its network is poor or non-existent (particularly in many parts of the Sperrins) and I've been to some parts where there are no networks available! Vodafone does tend to have quite wide coverage - around here they, along with Orange and later MBNL, tended to make big use of hilltop and mountain top sites which could cover quite large swathes. O2 OTOH tended to keep their cell sites lower down, one exception being the Brougher Mountain broadcast site (all networks are live up there).

I'll get back to more on this later, as I have to go away somewhere right now.

Bugger me..... do you touch type???
Hahahahahaha

I knew a lot of people on O2 when the first Simplicity deals appeared - 2004 onwards. These needed one person in the "group" (often family) to have a contract phone and then as many simplicity SIMs could be ordered. Then it was free calling between the SIMs and these SIMs were otherwise like PAYG. Lots of parents got them for teenagers, and when over 18 the teens got their own contracts, they stayed with the same network.

I wonder if NI never had the "half rate codec" deployed as the call quality here for O2 users on 2G is horrific, but may be due to popularity and customer growth faster than spectrum/backhaul budgets.

The Palm Pre exclusive followed by the iPhone exclusive (upto the 3GS) was reckoned to have helped save O2 but it brought too many high usage users to the network, so frequent "unable to activate PCP context" messages on iPhone 3G and 3GS users when the O2 data network couldn't cope occured. Orange launching the iPhone 3GS in very late 2009 showed their network could cope with the data (at the time).

Have to say it's very interesting to hear all this about the networks in Northern Ireland
No one usually talks about us!

If that quote were true, then that doesn't explain how O2's market share went up four percentage points between Q1 2013 and Q1 2014 in Northern Ireland even with them already being the dominant player, and which during this time period (AFAIK) the only network offering a 4G product was EE! O2 didn't have 4G in Belfast until May last year, I assume given the roll out Vodafone appeared at the same time, while I don't think 3 have any 4G presence in even Belfast yet.

It is also a bit unfair to label a bunch of people as not willing to change even if something might benefit them - in some cases this would appear to be true, take for example the domestic electricity market in NI where Power NI are the dominant player despite definitely not being the cheapest (for the record, I'm with Budget Energy) but they do shift in other areas for example when natural gas first became available in Belfast and how popular that has become. Same goes for O2 around a decade ago as their PAYG and sim-only offerings were very good on what was (and still is) a decent 2G network with probably the best coverage in NI, and people moved en-masse.

I said around 2013 when MBNL was rolling out 3G coverage to areas which only previously had Orange 2G (and a few old T-Mobile 'islands') that it would be in vain of attempting to gain more customers locally for them unless they started actively advertising these upgrades on TV, radio, print etc. But other than a couple of press releases they didn't really do anything - it was such a wasted opportunity for them. From that same Ofcom survey in Q1 2013 the combined Orange/T-Mobile market share was 14% (Orange 12%, T-M 2%), one year later the combined EE/Orange/T-Mobile share was 12% (Orange 8%, EE 3%, T-M 1%) - an utter waste of an opportunity to make inroads into an area which especially outside the main urban areas was largely starved of 3G let alone 4G (though O2 had started making measured progress with its 3G coverage in mid 2012). While technically EE's network is probably the best of the four, examples like the above puts another example down of executive blundering that the network has made in its short lifespan. Will BT be any better on this?

Back in the mid-noughties a lot of O2 deals and add-ons gave quite a lot of free calls on-net that certainly don't appear on a lot of their new tariffs. Things like O2 family etc. and I still know quite a few people on the now grandfathered (?) O2 Unlimited PAYG tariff which because almost everyone on their mobile phonebook is on O2 makes most of their calls & texts free.

PAYG was the dominant method of mobile phone connections here for some time, I think it's only very recently that contracts either through handset-included or sim-only deals have combined now overtaken pre-paid over here, so many of the simplicity deals deals wouldn't have registered with many people in NI around a decade ago. The majority of people would have simply bought pre-paid phones back then - sim-only has really only started to get more noticed since the turn of the decade.

The point about family habits may have some truth to it though. As an anecdote, I'm responsible for co-ordinating mobile phones for my parents and siblings and at present we're all on Lycamobile at the moment and giffgaff before that - the reason? Free on-net calls, so it's easy and cheap for all of us to contact each other. My brother moved on to O2 however because (a) his workplace had deals with O2 for in-store contract discounts, and (b) his now fiancée is on O2 herself. Also the amount of adults in Northern Ireland under 30 who still live with their parents (over 35% at the last survey a couple of years ago) is significantly higher than in Britain. I put that down to cultural differences.


No, I reckon that O2 do use GSM-HR on most of their 2G network here even in rural areas. I can certainly notice the difference if I start a call on 3G and then during it it switches over to 2G. Subjectively I would say it's the worst of all the network's call quality with Vodafone being slightly better and Orange being the best of 2G call quality (Orange I think must have EFR in place, it's difficult sometimes to tell the difference with a standard 3G voice call with them). But the funny thing is that most people don't really seem to be too bothered about it for whatever reasons. I find the quality tolerable and no problem in around 99% of calls, maybe that's why I put up with it.


I think it's worth remembering that back in 2007 there was still five active networks in the UK and that we're now on the cusp of seeing that reduced to three, I think it's safe to say that had Orange & T-Mobile had not combined to become EE, at least one of those networks by now would have either gone bust or have gone dark i.e. pulled out of the UK and returned their operating licence to Ofcom. I've never been an iPhone user, but even during times when I only had GPRS from O2 (again 2007) I could still stream radio through it whilst being a 3 customer! IIRC around that same time Orange's network was supposedly close to buckling over its own weight pre-3GS days in parts of the UK, before they started their own pre-EE 3G expansion programme.

Just to finish off what I started on Friday evening, over the last 15 years my main mobile phone has been on at various times Orange, then Vodafone, then O2, then Orange, back to O2, then to 3 and then back to O2's network. In terms of coverage, the best time I had was when I had a contract with 3. At the time they only had a single base station that couldn't even cover half of the town of Omagh reliably, but their 2G fall back was on both Orange and O2 (initially both with data roaming as well, but near the end of the contract O2 was calls & texts only). It meant that there was very few spots where I couldn't get a signal at all and in nearly all cases, this meant there was no coverage from any operator. To a certain extent, I miss those days.

It's worth remembering that this time just three years ago, 3G coverage in Northern Ireland especially outside Belfast was diabolical for all networks, and that's no joke. When I took out my contract with 3 in the summer of 2007, they were the only network with a 3G signal in Omagh, a town of around 22,000 people. Vodafone then introduced 3G in around 2009. O2 then had a 2100MHz 3G service in 2011, a 900MHz service from around the start of 2012. Until the Orange sites got MBNL'd in around March 2013, they only had 2G GPRS coverage!

I was living in Omagh itself from late 2011 to early 2014 but I've now moved back out to the village I grew up in, here O2's 3G900 service from Omagh could be obtained outdoors in open areas but the local O2 cell site was itself upgraded for 3G900 in around June 2012. That same cell site is now 4G'd with 3G on 2100 MHz as well. Vodafone 3G & 4G is now available from the same site but their 2G service is still from their original site. Where I live now, my service from EE & 3 depends from what part of the house I'm in, on one side it comes from a cell site that has been fully upgraded to 4GEE (and whose 2G service has the T-Mobile network ID with EDGE) while on the other it comes from the Brougher Mountain broadcast site which is 3G only for now (and whose 2G service ID is Orange with GPRS only). Unfortunately neither site is strong enough even combined to give full coverage in my abode - the living room being the main black spot but other room also have a tendency for the signal to disappear seemingly at random. It's the same with my parents house which would be the place I'd visit most outside of my own home - reception other than in where my old bedroom was is just a blank. And this is the reason why I stick with O2's network for mobile - if I'm outdoors I know that EE & 3 in general have good coverage (I currently have a T-M sim in my Nexus 7 tablet) but indoors I have either my own WiFi access at my own home or usually access to it at most other indoor locations I visit so mobile data isn't critical in these places and 2G fall back for calls & texts in these places are important. I know 3 has Three-in-touch but it still has plenty of integration problems like O2's TuGo has. As I've said O2's data speeds aren't blistering, but they are perfectly fine for myself - Vodafone has been ruled out by myself because of their poor 3G coverage as well as problems with their 2G network locally in the last 18 months (though if this current Cornerstone roll out really gets going they might become an option again). So for me on balance O2's network is the best for me for my mobile telephony, but for my Nexus 7, I tend to use either EE or 3 at present for data outdoors when I haven't a WiFi hotspot available. It also helps that with a lot fewer people on average on EE and 3's networks in Northern Ireland means that especially in rural areas their networks aren't likely to be heavily loaded.


It might be worth setting one up in the same vein as the EE 2G/3G/4G network thread or the Vodafone/O2 4G experience thread, given different vagaries in mobile network performance & coverage compared to Britain as well as different priorities e.g. roaming issues in many border areas. Might start one myself?

I would quite like to see Three customers able to use O2 2G properly if the merger is allowed to go ahead. Not roaming but an actual 2G network.

Orange launched EFR in about 1998 and its been standard on their network since then. I assume one2one/T-Mobile did the same, but have no knowledge. EFR was launched with the nk702 (the Orange software/GSM 1800 version of the Nokia 6110) and the difference calling someone who had a 702 versus someone without EFR was noticeable.

I have conversations with people who have not realised why their calls sound bad, and they tell me "Mobile phone calls always sound awful" and I ask "are you on O2?" which they generally are. They're surprised at the difference on Vodafone or EE on 2G only handsets. But these are the sort of people who don't realise 3G rollout coverage is per operator and think its something shared :-/ <sigh>

They're doing this in the Republic of Ireland at the moment, but it appears not to be without teething problems for both 3 IRL and ex-O2 IRL customers at present.

Mediocrity takes a lot less time and most people won't notice the difference till its too late

Last year I was dealing with some people in a small village in the Sperrin Mountains in Tyrone, whom almost all of them were on Vodafone 2G. The main reason being that back in the early 00's that was all that was available to them. In the past couple of years their service from Vodafone often went down for days at a time and because it was a rather isolated area and the cell site serving them was on a locally high mountain top serving a wide area across Mid-Tyrone (around a radius of 10-15 miles), there was no overlap from another cell to provide reduced coverage. Sure Signal wasn't an option for most of them as very few could even get an ADSL service as the local exchange was around 7 miles away (though a good amount of them can now get VDSL2+ as a couple of local cabinets have been upgraded and brought into service a few weeks ago) meaning the only alternative to dial-up was a ropey fixed-wireless service. When I explained to them that EE and 3 were available from the same cell site Vodafone used, they didn't believe me despite the fact that Orange 2G on its own was made available there eight years previously! That Orange cell site was MBNL'd in July 2013, and EE switched on 4G in December that year, with "Double Speed" implemented in the summer last year. In the space of about 18 months this village went from having a scratchy 2G mobile coverage with the only broadband other than satellite being a fixed wireless service that ground to a near halt at evenings and weekends, to having near 80Mbps VDSL2+ and 4G coverage!

But again it goes back to making people aware of what's available - I had to actually show them using my stuff that EE & 3 were available where they lived, that coverage at least outdoors was except in a couple of places as good as Vodafone's 2G and that you could make good quality calls & high-speed data. Just over a year ago I was showing someone at their farm a speed test for EE which despite their coverage map claiming that no reception on even 2G was possible, 4G was there (there was visual line-of-sight to the mast FFS!) and download speeds were hitting 25-30Mpbs. Safe to say I had to lift his jaw from the ground. . A few of those villagers are now on Orange & EE but it was with no thanks to the network themselves. Like I said about the lack of promotion EE & 3 gave about the expansion of their 3G coverage in Northern Ireland in 2013, many people didn't realise that Orange on 2G was a possible option itself since around 2004! It took actual, real-world demonstrations and from then on word-of-mouth for people to realise that there was an alternative to Vodafone whom didn't seem to give any f***s about them, even business customers.

Could you elaborate?

Numerous talk about it on the mobile section and operator sub-forums on boards.ie

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showt...p?t=2057400780

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showt...p?t=2057397646

http://www.boards.ie/ttforum/1367

http://www.boards.ie/ttforum/1479