back to article Three scoops 'most reliable network' crown, EE takes every other title

Three emerges as the UK’s most reliable mobile operator and EE as the UK’s fastest, in RootMetrics' biannual network survey. EE’s plump spectrum and its investment in capacity and benefits pay off in the results, where it was rated as first in five of the survey’s six key categories. Three won the reliability category for the …

  1. aelking

    rootmetrics?

    Does anyone trust the results from rootmetrics?

    1. TheVogon

      Three

      Just bought another Three 12GB data SIM for my Q7 SatNav / WiFi - which lasts up to a year and cost me £48 from eBay. I used Three for this for the last year andi have had zero issues.

  2. Ryan Clark

    Vodafone maybe rubbish most of the time, but they are the only network I can get even semi reliably where I live, less that 20 miles from Birmingham and in between two other large towns. Even then I still lose connectivity to the mobile network every now and then. The coverage maps all show our area as having 3g for all networks. They are lying.

    1. Danny 14

      Same here in the lake district. H+ is mostly absent outside carlisle, penrith and keswick. H on the A roads and 3G elsewhere. 2g (edge) elsewhere but at least i get connection. Three is pretty much A roads only and EE patchy. No idea on O2.

  3. Cynical Shopper
    FAIL

    Vodafone last?

    "Vodafone .. comes last when the various categories are averaged out."

    "RootMetrics gives EE a weighted aggregated score of 88.1, Three 84.5, Vodafone 78.6 and O2 76.6."

    If Vodafone are last, what are O2?

    1. aelking

      Re: Vodafone last?

      Part of Three?

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    RootMetrics gives EE a weighted aggregated score of 88.1

    So EE BT are tops due to owning the backhaul?

    bet Voda drop down more when their packets start getting filtered more too

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: RootMetrics gives EE a weighted aggregated score of 88.1

      "So EE BT are tops due to owning the backhaul?"

      Really, when did BT merge with EE again?

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: RootMetrics gives EE a weighted aggregated score of 88.1

      "So EE BT are tops due to owning the backhaul?

      bet Voda drop down more when their packets start getting filtered more too"

      BT only bought EE one week ago - I doubt they've even got their hands on the keys yet.

      Vodafone own their own backhaul network - they bought C&W's UK national network.

      Regardless though, carriers don't use consumer broadband to deliver backhaul. The amount of bandwidth they buy is the amount they get. If I buy 200Mbps from London to Edinburgh I expect to get every single one of those bits, all of (OK, 99.999%) the time.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: RootMetrics gives EE a weighted aggregated score of 88.1

        Anon for obvious reasons ...

        > Vodafone own their own backhaul network - they bought C&W's UK national network

        And don't we know it. We have leased lines that are now with Vodamoan. It was bad enough when Clueless & Witless borged Thus, but Vodamoan took things to new depths in customer disservice.

        When Thus borged Yourcomms it wasn't too bad - they were still a smallish entity, and the people who understood the Yourcomms network were still part of it. Now were on the bit of Vodamoan's network that they'd rather pretend didn't exist.

  5. Fortycoats

    Coloured Balls

    When I hear rootmetrics I somehow think of coloured balls rolling down a ramp. And T-Mobile's Superbowl commercial :-)

    I was sick of that Verizon ad when watching NFL Gamepass on Sundays.

  6. eJ2095

    Well

    As there will only be a couple of mobile companies around soon will make these awards pointless

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Another EE win?

    EE should also scoop the title for having the most impenetrable and awful web site.

    1. dotdavid

      Re: Another EE win?

      Still better than when I was with them and they had three impenetrable and awful web sites; one for each brand.

    2. Alan Brown Silver badge

      Re: Another EE win?

      They scooped the title for most complained about Telco, eclipsing TalkTalk's previous efforts.

  8. Headwesty

    Why don't these statistics cover MVNOs as well? I know these piggy-back on the big four networks but I can never get a straight answer about whether they have the same service level or just the leftovers after the main brand customers have got in there first...

    1. Martin Summers Silver badge

      If you think about that for a moment (not meaning to be condescending when I say that BTW) if you ran a network and had someone piggyback on it, would you prioritise someone else's customers over and above your own on that network?

      Regardless of that it is often the infrastructure of the MVNO such as the billing systems that fall flat before the network does. GiffGaff had this many times and they are even owned by the network they piggyback on. I think you can safely conclude that MVNO's get the scraps.

      1. Phil Kingston

        "would you prioritise someone else's customers over and above your own on that network?"

        Might depend on the contractural and financial arrangements.

        I think in some territories the MVNOs only get access to some of the primary carrier's bands. So very much the scraps.

    2. IglooDude

      It depends on the architecture, I think. Frequently the big networks optimize the retail/public APN's speeds via sharing among GGSNs/SGSNs (or whatever the LTE terms are), and the MVNOs might only be using one or two GGSNs for their own APNs. My sense is that the MVNO is (or should be) offering some network customization options in lieu of pure speed, where data is concerned. For voice, it's typically identical between them.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Dear Vodafone

    Maybe this will teach you not to starve your network of investment whilst simultaneously milking your customers to shore up your oversea's investments.

    Paybacks a bitch.

    1. Martin Summers Silver badge

      Re: Dear Vodafone

      Vodafone is the only network I have ever paid to get out of the contract early. It just felt like they were using steam to power their network.

  10. Vince

    "And much depends on what you value. If you find dropped calls disruptive, Three is the one to choose. If you use your mobile mostly for data, then it’s EE."

    Um...

    If I value a properly working service, three is my choice (and still is)

    EE was my choice for 6 weeks. 4 weeks of which was arguing with them to give me my legal right to cancel as the service was cancelled both within the cooling off period and was demonstrably not fit for purpose.

    Won't be making that mistake again, ported back to three, no further issues.

  11. Sub 20 Pilot

    EE Mobile - fucking joke. Where I live, in a small town with a lot of infrastructure and a lot of public sector offices / university / hospital etc. their coverage is shit.

    Outside, in smallish mountainous terrain it is even worse. One local village loses all EE connectivity for about a day every few weeks with no fix in sight.

    I have what is laughably called a 4g contract. Now and again I get 3g to run for a bit before keeling over or dropping calls and data. I could leave the phone downloading data 24 hours a day and I doubt it would get anywhere near my 2gb data limit per month it is that bloody slow.

    I have an android phone which has all the pointless crap removed and the rest of the useless rubbish disabled from updating so should not be down to shit going on in the background.

    It would be nice to have a realistic database of what works where and not the 'coverage' statistics put out by marketing pricks.

    1. Phil Kingston

      IIRC one big organisation (the Beeb?) tried some sort of crowdsource effort a few years back to try and get a realistic coverage map by having an app on phones that would (presumably) tag location and signal strength and report back. I wonder what happened to that? I might see if I can find it. It may have been killed by privacy concerns. Or not popular enough to make the data worthwhile, or something.

  12. Ian Entwistle

    The UK is a BIG place, of course every supplier will have good and bad spots, surely the sensible ones of us test where we need/want to use our phones the most and go with the best in those areas? e.g. I live in a small town in Lancashire, work in Cheshire and have a holiday caravan in Blackpool. Vodafone work best for me at home and work but are a tad intermittent at B'pool. So I have voda in my phone and an EE Mifi for the caravan... Its not exactly rocket science....

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