That is true for tall masts, but short 800MHz masts still have a coverage problem, in built up areas at least. At my location a 15m mast 1 mile away has a very similar dBm to a 25m mast 2.5 miles away. Both 15m 800MHz masts I know of don't have a range further than about 1.5 miles in a built up area.

Not where I live!

Are you forced onto 800Mhz only?

No, I am forced onto no signal though, frequently!

Ah yes, I was talking from an EE perspective. I forgot Three 3G can be a bit overloaded these days. d123 has the idea. Bit of a fiddle and probably not great to fiddle too much while driving but that would do it.

Yeah that'll be Three's new network mechanism to force you onto no signal when there is one.........
Yep! Coat.... got it already......

The mast I am connected to is over 20 miles away.

Do you have any information about local terrain or the height of the mast? I can see 20 miles potentially being achievable on a very tall mast with flat terrain, but miles and miles from a 15m mast in a built-up area is simple unachievable imo as my personal experience also confirms.

It does seem a bit far although LTE is capable of working up to 60 odd miles on a tall enough mast. I think from what I can remember, the optimal cell size is about 4 miles or so, give or take. At 20 miles though you would need to be in line of sight certainly.
I would imagine that they would/can restrict the distance electronically.
LTE must have this ability built in.
Down here Three have 800 on the MArldon TV transmitter near Torquay.
It provides spotty coverage right up on Dartmoor at Haytor. But it's weak.
This is 10 miles away.

Talking of EE would you say they are a better bet at the moment for those who probably won't get onto 800mhz for a while? Although I'm only paying £13 a month for unlimited data, I've found a 12 month sim only deal with EE with 10gb data (should be plenty) and that works out at about £15 after cash back. Wondering if i'll experience less slowdowns with EE compared with Three, on 4g and 3g? Coverage with Three isn't the issue for me - frequent slowdowns due to heavy demand (I guess) is.

Your asking the wrong person really as I admit I'm a bit of an EE fanboi.
However it does appear over the last year or so, on here, that the Three 3G network has slowed significantly. That's just what I'm hearing, Not my actual experience. Just to be clear.
EE does have it's issues in certain parts of the UK but as a general rule they are building their network with capacity in mind. For the future basically. Also it helps that the CEO seems to be on a personal quest to get 100 population coverage... somehow...
This in itself would require major geographical coverage to achieve anything near 99.5%.
My own experience with an iPhone 6 is 3G very rarely goes under 10Mbps (sometimes hits 25 with the wind in the right direction) and 4G is nearly always over 25 and a good 60% of the time, over 50Mbps.

As a generalisation (and I'm sure I will be corrected if wrong) EE has plans to get fibre to very nearly every mast (18,000). This has a base speed of 1Gbps but is scalable to 10 or even 100Gbps.
That would be over 30 Gigabits per sector. Even if you loaded a sector with full spectrum 3400, 2600, 2100 (once refarmed to 4G), 1800 and 800, you wouldn't get close to using that.
In other words, once done, backhaul is never going to be a problem for a very long time indeed.
They are also committed to getting 20Mhz 1800 4G on every mast. 10,000 done so far I think, 8000 to go. This will be their base 4G network.
Also they have oodles of 2600 (35Mhz). Already some 2600 on in Torquay down here.
Urban areas are going to always be faster on EE purely because of the 2600 taking a huge amount of load off 1800.
I also think we will see 2600 arriving in rural areas too as Carrier aggregation makes for better load balancing (thanks japaul) not just speed increases.
Once the power on 2600/1800 is turned up to 2G levels, that is going to be one bad boy of a network I can tell you.
With 800 then reaching 30% further we aren't going to know ourselves.
Three are going to struggle in the near future in urban areas unless they get that 1400 and maybe 3400 but I just think EE are going to get there way way quicker with a network that is set up better with more capacity overall.
This is why we don't have VoLTE yet.
It ain't bloody working 100% so we ain't getting it. Frustrating, but I prefer to wait till it works properly. WiFi calling (barring a few niggles) is a good case in point.

The only network I see as being a threat to EE is Vodafone but they have some bloody serious catching up to do and if their attitude to rural dwellers is the same as for their 3G network, they can forget it!

Just for the record, if I had to put the networks in order of preference (you know, you put a gun to my head), it would be EE, Three, Vodafone, O2.
Three and Vodafone would swap if Vodafone had UK wide reasonable Internet coverage.

Thanks for the response, that was really helpful. I suspected that EE are in a much stronger position and I guess if I won't be able to access Three's 800mhz that's even more of a reason to move across. I know I won't be able to use wifi calling but this shouldn't be a massive deal.
As for Vodafone I was with them for about 6 years from 2008 and they were absolutely useless in terms of 3G in rural areas. Most of the time I'd have either 'G' or 'E', neither of which would allow me to actually do anything!

Three were unable to confirm the mast to me because their system only lets them see a 20 mile radius around your current location. The customer relations team can see which masts you are connecting to.

I believe the mast to be around 50m high.

The only issue with 1400 and 3400 is that hardly any handsets or MiFi's are made for these freq's unlike the 800/1800/2600 freq's that are on pretty much every 4G device (except the original iPhone 5). As customers end up keeping devices for much longer than in the past, this will become important.


I think Vodafone is beating Three in a lot of places now, and they are improving very fast. They have a very poor start point however. I reckon Three and Vodafone could swap in early 2017 - and if Three and O2 merge then both those networks will jointly stall due to the integration hassles.

I suspect Gigabit connects to a mast about 50m high on very high land. He also has a LoS to the mast minus a few trees.

My cousin is on Vodafone. Great voice network but she can't use things like Apple maps navigation like I can. Once she leaves Plymouth that's it, 2G all the way. Brilliant, what is this, the 90s? Maps would work perfectly well with 0.5Mbps 3G but she's stuck on GPRS or EDGE that doesn't work.
For balance and to be fair, EDGE doesn't work on any network unless A: You are stationary and B: you have a very good signal.

I have no idea what is going on with Three prioritising 800 lower than 3G. No one seems to be able to get a decent signal on it. It should work if they have implemented handover to/from 3G properly but it appears they haven't bothered in a crazy attempt to beat EE to getting VoLTE out. I could be wrong on this but that's what seems to have happened.
Switching from 4G voice (packet switched) to 3G voice (Circuit switched) is no mean feat and going the other way (which is what you'd need if your 800 is prioritised lower than your 2100 (3G)) is even trickier.
The reason Three have done this is because they are rushing 800 out to get "98% coverage" before Christmas. If it was a higher priority than 2100 then it would quickly become overloaded as ALL 4G handsets that couldn't get 4G1800 would jump on it.
Three now have 5Mhz of 800 on masts that don't have 4G1800.
I believe AT&T or possibly another US network tried this and it simply didn't work.
Not enough bandwidth, too many handsets.

I'm fairly certain that EE will roll out 800 at a higher priority than 2100.
To do this they have to fairly confident that their 4G1800 network is reaching far enough on it's current low power.
I'm not so sure it does. In my car holder up on the dash I get 4G1800 most of the time now driving around. But if I take it out and hold it in my hand it normally goes to 3G (if the 4G signal was 2 bars say, in the the car holder). This means that in these circumstances I would jump to 800 and so would one hell of a lot of others in a given area.
In Teignmouth today, take the phone out and hold it up for a bit and a couple bars 4G (1800), put it in your pocket and back to 3G (this would be 800 in an activated area).
Most of these handsets would be inactive so no problem and often pulling the handset out from pocket or bag it would go from 3G to 4G1800 so in an 800 area the same would happen (with 1800 being higher than 800).

I think EE are getting as many 1800 masts done as possible before 800 switch on. They are going mental down here. All the Orange masts are suddenly being integrated like mad.
I also think they are getting 4G to 3G handover and vise versa working properly (something called SRVCC and Reverse SRVCC) before rollout.
This would give them the flexibility to do 800 either higher or lower than 3G2100 and probably allow them to switch between them if there were problems with capacity.
That's my take on it.
Bookey will come along now and blow me away with a single sentence...

50m is incredibly tall for the UK, I've seen some monster towers in the USA but not here. Do you mean 50ft by chance, that would be 15m ?

The very close EE/MBNL (originally T-mob) mast pretty much next to me can be seen from the bypass road and all over the area and it is above the 3rd story height. Given a 3 story (say 4m per story) building is around 12m, the mast is probably at the 15m height.

Maybe Gigabit's (he or she) tower is a 15m structure on top of a hill? Like those on the south side of Guildford

Government is trying to get permission for 80ft (24m) masts apparently:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technolog...ral-areas.html

The UK is still a split metric/imperial country

This was Sprint, although to be fair theirs was an ever bigger cock up.

They had <2Mbps 3G on EVDO and chose to upgrade their network to WiMax as their 4g technology, became clear that this wasn't good and switched to LTE, using 5Mhz bandwidth on band 25 (That's 1900MHz so Devon isn't looking it up ). Even on their relatively small customer base it was absolute crap so they're rushing to upgrade to what they called Spark and now call LTE+ network which has 5MHz FDD on band 25 (10Mhz in some very special areas to be fair), 5Mhz on band 26 (850) and 20MHz TDD on band 41 (2500-2600) and now they're rolling out a 2nd carrier of 20 on band 41 and are planning a third carrier. It will be good but they have the same issue, their network isn't dense enough for VoLTE.

I'm talking meters. The Guildford Hog's back mast is 47m to the top of the UHF array, so I'd imagine that 3's supervoice antennas there are about 35m. Also, Vodafone's 4G panels are at 90m on the Midhurst transmitter

Bloody hell Man, I've been on the red you know. That's a lot of info to take in just before Christmas.......
Thank you for saving me having to look that one up (although I did know it off by heart to be fair).
Jeez, what a mess. And we thought it was messy over here???
Walk in the bloody park, that's what we have here....

UK networks rarely go over about 30 metres but there are exceptions.
Here is the North Hessary Tor TV transmitter at Princetown (yes, famous for the prison).
http://www.thebigtower.com/live/NHT/Index.htm
Height of cells are (or were, so make up your own mind who is at what height)...

Orange - 40 metres
O2 - 22 metres
Vodafone - 60 metres
Three - 30 metres
T-Mobile - 38 metres.

Or even the Marldon (Beacon Hill) transmitting station for most of the South Hams ( I get my TV form this one)...
http://www.thebigtower.com/live/Beacon/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beacon...itting_station

Orange - 57 metres
O2 - 54 metres
Vodafone - 63 metres
Three - 25 metres
T-Mobile - 73 metres

God knows which arrays they have kept and which ones have been decommissioned.
This info from Sitefinder and so completely out of date........

That makes sense, on existing very-tall structures (e.g. TV masts) the heights are different. I was thinking of sites dedicated to cellular.

Just to add some balance to this - I get 0.3Mbps on 3G maybe 60% of the time and 1-2Mbps at other times. 4G varies between 13-30Mbps on perhaps a 50:50 basis.

Both of these were taken from Llandudno which apparently only has one cell site enabled for LTE. It is supposedly also enabled for 800mhz.

Am i looking at 1800 and 800 or am i looking at two 1800 sites?

Both came up as unknown frequency in lte discovery.

http://s29.postimg.org/61948awlj/Scr...8_16_06_53.png
http://s29.postimg.org/8h6c8epaf/Scr...8_16_53_20.png

If that's an LG G4 use the built-in field tester to see the frequency in use.