Mobile phone reception, or lack thereof, is an irritating issue for many customers, especially when it seems that all available providers suffer from the same network service issues. Thankfully, help is at hand in navigating the best mobile network providers in the shape of a report that was published recently by a company called Rootmetrics. Last year, they carried out a detailed study that found that Vodafone offered mobile phone customers the worst network service, whilst EE offered the best. According to their website, Rootmetrics travelled the breadth of the UK and performed 1 million tests in a variety of situations, drove 24,000 miles and tested 1,200 indoor locations, all to ensure that their findings would be as in-depth and detailed as possible.
Some of the things that were tested included network speed, call performance and mobile internet performance; from these results, Rootmetrics was able to establish the different performance levels of each UK mobile network provider. All the providers have managed to improve their service, but despite this EE came out on top with an overall performance score of just 89.4%, Three came second with 86.2%, O2 came third with 79.5% and Vodafone came last with only 78.8%.
Understandably, Vodafone felt the need to defend its services and responded to the findings by stating that it had invested £1bn in to improving the network and that because of this customer satisfaction was increasing. Their spokesperson also explained that an independent report had found that in 15 of the cities where 4G had been introduced, Vodafone offered “unbeatable” or the “best” 4G coverage for their customers.
Despite Vodafone coming out worst in the overall performance stakes, things aren’t quite as simple when you break things down in to the individual categories. Whilst EE remained at the top for nearly all of the categories, with Three claiming a very close second, O2 and Vodafone were left to fight it out in the last two spots. O2 scored above Vodafone for network reliability and call performance, but for network speed, mobile internet and text performance Vodafone pulled ahead of O2.
Overall, it seems that EE and Three offer the best network service to their mobile phone customers and that seems to be true across the whole of the UK, but this report is likely to encourage a push from other providers to improve network service and close the gap in performance between the four main UK providers. Hopefully the next detailed study by Rootmetrics, due to be carried out this year, will be able to tell us if this is the case.
