A few weeks ago I went on a trip with friends to Sherwood forest which was great, but I soon came across a problem which we all encountered…no bars of signal. This led us to rename Sherwood Forest the land that signal forgot. Hardly the catchiest name in the world I know, but it does highlight a problem which I come across on a daily basis. Lack of phone signal causes me major annoyance throughout the day and i’m sure it does for you too. Dropped calls, failed text messages, abysmal 2G speeds, sporadic 3G coverage has led me to research into the best network (in the UK) so I can alleviate the problem, let me tell you it hasn’t been easy.Let me share my findings, first I thought I’d share with you what i found on Ofcom.Below are two maps depicting signal coverage in the Uk . On the left is the 3G coverage and the right is 2G. Starting with the 2G you can see using the key below that coverage isn’t too bad if you live in England with overall decent 2G coverage mainly in the 70% – 90% area with spattering’s of 50% – 70%. But leave England and you realize that signal coverage is woefully poor to non existent in places with mainly 25% – 50% even dropping to less than 25% . This just isn’t good enough .
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Best Network
Lets now look at the individual networks. I’m going to look at the big four which are EE , Vodafone, O2, Three . Most other networks run off these so it makes sense to just look at the four.
Top left- EE, Top right - 3, Bottom left - Vodafone, Bottom right - O2
I looked at the area around where I live as a reference, as you can see the signal is rather all over the place on every network. For the most part you’re going to get phone and texts and maybe 2G, but 3G is hard to get unless you’re in the center of a city or town.This is what you tend to see in the rest of the country, the major cities have decent coverage and the surrounding areas struggle to get any kind of meaningful data speeds. I will leave it up to you to determine what network is “better” after all it all depends on what you’re looking for from your network. But for me none of the “big four” are perfect and all of them have a lot of work to do .I will finish with a plea to the networks, 4G is just over the horizon and its only a good thing, but how can we possibly move on to new speeds when our current infrastructure is so poor. Please lets not repeat the mistakes of the past lets have an all encompassing 3G network before we even think about 4G . 3G should be the minimum I shouldn’t have to see 2G anywhere on my phone.Links
OpensignalOfcomUK Mobile Coverage
Written by +Chris Monks. Go to thekugelblitz.com for more of his stuff.
