I have not tried Vodafone 4G but they were totally abysmal on 3G in Oxfordshire when I ditched them about a year ago - some places had 5-bar 2G signal and NO 3G at all!!!!!!

I am not returning anytime soon.

Yes in my part of Hampshire / Surrey border, if you don't get 4G on Vodafone, the 3G is either very slow or not working. If you get 4G then things are great (and the 3G in 4G upgraded areas is noticeably better, as it has to be to support voice calls).

Some have been waiting for more than a year! Hehe But yes good news if its going to get off the ground at last.

They are the worst network at the moment for 3g coverage-wise. They are expanding quite rapidly so the hope is that they'll reach some kind of parity with MBNL soon. Parity is still quite a way off as they would need to increase the mast density quite a lot to get to MBNL levels as their rollout so far is 3g900 based which doesn't provide the same kind of speed as 3g2100.

The 4g network is meant to be pretty solid, good speeds and it's expanding rapidly with o2's help, they've also got London within their 4.5g network.

If in the event that both BT buy out EE and Hutchinson take over O2, both networks would be in breach of the spectrum limits set by Ofcom in the 800/2600MHz auction - EE (already at the 105MHz paired spectrum limit) would suddenly have BT's NSV spectrum as well, while a 3 & O2 combined network would have 32.2MHz paired spectrum below 1GHz (limit is 2x27.5MHz). BT/EE would end up with 50MHz out of the 70 MHz of the paired FDD 2600MHz (as well as 20MHz of TDD spectrum in the same band), with 3/O2 holding 50% of the 800MHz FDD spectrum.

Something tells me that Ofcom wouldn't be happy with either scenario. As I said in the EE network discussion thread, if I was a betting man I could see a spectrum "trade" take place, or possibly forced by Ofcom.

Vodafone will become the best again, mark my words...

I think BT's 2X15MHz will have to be traded, and EE probably already know this or else they may have built a cat 9 network with 2X50MHz and claimed it was necessary they kept all the spectrum. Also EE will have considerably more spectrum than the others per customer, even if it is mainly high band.

However I don't think Ofcom will mind Three having 2X32.2MHz of low band spectrum. They aren't nearly reaching the total paired spectrum limit, and they didn't do anything about O2 and Vodafone owning 50% of the 900MHz band. The low band spectrum cap will need to be increased in time for the 700MHz auction anyway if they want anyone other than EE to bid, which they couldn't anyway at the moment being at the paired spectrum limit.