KPH tech blog

Picking a great device is one thing, but another consideration must be the network or carrier who provides coverage for calls, texts and data.

While I will explore call quality in a later post, for now I’m going to concentrate on data coverage, as that’s a top priority for me, and compare the UK phone networks based on my previous experience with each of them. First up: O2.

O2

I had the Nokia Lumia 820, a 4G-ready future proof smartphone, and I’d gone with o2. The reviewers were right about the Lumua 820 being future proof, but the o2 network wasn’t exactly great at offering a service in the ‘now’. And that sucked.

O2, a company that once traded under the name BT Cellnet before BT sold the business to Telefonica, were a well known company (they’d taken control of the redundant Millennium Dome and turned it into a multipurpose entertainment hub in the O2 Arena), and I felt like I was in good hands.

I’d been with T-Mobile as a Pay As You Go customer, back when the Nokia X2-00 was my daily driver. I didn’t leave them because I was unhappy with their service. On the contrary, I thought they were really good. But T-Mobile had recently merged with Orange to become EE, and contracts with them were particularly pricey. I saw the phone I wanted, at the price I wanted, and went with O2.

There was no real 4G coverage at that time (2012) in the UK – at least not in rural Suffolk – and I was still using 3G, even though I’d visited my local o2 store to acquire a 4G SIM card, to make sure I could receive their 4G signal.

Being restricted therefore to o2’s 3G service wasn’t a bad thing at the time, but was only of use when I could get a data signal, which I never could near my home.

I had to rely on my home WiFi to get on the Internet. This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing either, as I wasn’t eating into my measly 1GB data allowance every month. But it wasn’t until about a month before my contract finished, that the signal improved and I was able to get a basic 3G data signal on my Lumia 820, and I felt overall like I was paying for a service that half-heartedly existed.

When I went to O2, there was never really a reason why I left T-Mobile. It wasn’t that I didn’t like T-Mobile, as they had been my network on a Pay As You Go phone – my Nokia X2-00. But all new contracts were sold under the EE moniker, and as I’ve already said, they were pricey. With O2, I saw the phone I wanted (Lumia 820) at the price I wanted, I knew o2 by name, and I went for it.

But I never got a fantastic service from them, both on a data level and an aftersales one. The only times I talked to them on the phone, they were rude and not very helpful.

Apart from the useful O2 WiFi service in shops and restaurants, there didn’t seem to be any incentive to stay with them, especially not as other providers seemed to have 4G already and O2 hadn’t. Thus, I took my phone number and custom elsewhere, upgraded from a Windows Phone to the HTC Desire Eye running on Android, and kept my Lumia 820 as a secondary device.

EE

EE, being a merger of the T-Mobile and Orange networks, weren’t only the first UK-based 4G network, but also the best in terms of data signal coverage that was both reliable and superior to other networks. I’ve noticed this a lot over the last two years, especially when there’s a power cut or the Internet is down for whatever reason: I could continue to browse the Internet on my phone via mobile data.

To be honest, I’ve had a good reliable couple of years with EE, and the 4G signal has been great, eben in rural Suffolk. EE coverage has been much better than the sub-par 3G signal I was receiving with O2, so they’re near the top of my list in terms of service, just not with price.

I’ve done some initial calculations recently, but to get a phone like the Huawei P9 on my current deal I’ll have to pay an extra £5 per month. Unfortunately, that’s not within my budget of £30 per month, so I may have to look elsewhere.

Which is where the likes of Vodafone, Three and TalkTalk come in…

Vodafone

I used to have a phone with Vodafone way back when phones still had extruding aerials – mine was a Sharp GX10i, a handy flip phone that actually had a camera. It really was cool to have a camera on a mobile device, despite its VGA resolution and poor quality images.

I never had any problems with Vodafone in terms of call quality and texts, but I’ve never had the chance to test their data coverage.

I’ll have to rely on their website data for this one, and after a quick look on the Vodafone website, apparently I should have no trouble connecting to 4G with Vodafone in my hometown. However, I am weary about their map data’s accuracy, and shall investigate further…

TalkTalk

As far as I’m aware, the TalkTalk service runs off the Vodafone network – much like Asda Mobile, Tesco Mobile, and iD (by Carphone Warehouse).

The only reason for going with TalkTalk would be that they’re the providers of my home Internet, which means I would benefit from doubled data limits each month.

Phones from TalkTalk come on three price plans: Small, Medium and Large, with 500MB, 1GB and 2GB of data ramped up to 1GB, 2GB and 4GB respectively.

From a quick look on their site, it looks like my plans of getting a new device like the Huawei P9 or LG G5 may be thwarted, as they seem to be offering older or cheaper devices. But if it all comes down to price, which eventually it will, then I may yet have to consider older phones.

Three (3)

With Three, on the other hand, I’ve actually experienced a pretty good service. I invested in a Mobile-WiFi hotspot box a few years ago, a ‘MiFi’ box by Huawei, and for the most part, signal coverage has been great.

The MiFi hub initially enabled me to get online at home to use services such as Xbox Live and PSN, back before we invested in a proper home WiFi system (our family PC was so old and slow, that it wasn’t worth upgrading from cabled Internet to WiFi until we got a new computer).

Apart from occasional outages in so-called ‘notspots’ I could always get a decent signal to browse the ‘net on either my iPod Touch or Lumia 820. I even used it while on a holiday in Cornwall to check-in on Facebook and let the world know I wasn’t dead. Meanwhile, O2’s data coverage in Cornwall was familiarly non-existent.

I’ve never had any complaints about Three, and much the same as with EE, my experience with them was and has been far superior to my experience with O2.

Three often tout themselves as the network for data, so with this and my experiences in mind, I’ll certainly be considering them for my next phone. Especially after noticing a rather eye-popping deal for the Honor 8: 12GB of data, with unlimited calls and texts, at only £33 per month.

Wow! That’s a steal!