Virgin 'dumps' Vodaphone??

[HughJarsse]

Interesting article in 'this is money'

Apparently going ahead.   Well, well, well, 

Setback for Vodafone as Virgin Media dumps deal | This is Money

[enlli]

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@HughJarsse wrote:

'Only trouble is you might be back in the proverbial if Vodafone get three as that’s what will happen next me thinks '

Considering that '3' have their own masts, I would assume that Vodafone would just add three's masts to their masts, thus giving much better coverage to the pair of them, rather than just using Voda's and ditching three's.  Possible win/win for Voda customers getting better coverage in certain areas?? 

Voda is poor in almost all my area, yet '3' is strong everywhere I go.

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Any merger between Vodafone (not Vodaphone) and 3 will find OFCOM looking very closely at frequency and spectrum allocation, so it won't be as simple as just bringing the two together. Expect protracted notifications.

As to speeds, well at home Vodafone give me 50+ MBs whilst 3, well let us just say I have an old dial up modem in the loft that gave better speeds. At my daughters I struggle even to get a 3 signal where Vodafone has just gone 5G in that area and gives around 280 MBs. It's horses for courses, as they say.

[Roger_Gooner]

I've got to say that I have no problem with O2. My backup phone is on giffgaff (which runs on O2) and I've got two friends transferred onto giffgaff, no problem reported by them either. When the day comes that my Virgin Mobile is moved to O2 I'm expecting it to be trouble-free, and at worst I will need a new SIM card (unless I upgrade to a Samsung Galaxy S22 that I'm mulling over).

[cje85]

O2 in total has well over 30mil customers (including MVNOs like Giffgaff/Sky/Tesco Mobile) but has very limited spectrum holdings meaning it suffers congestion in many areas. Even the smallest operator (Three) has more spectrum and far fewer customers to serve. 

Another issue is some years ago O2 and Vodafone formed a joint agreement, where Vodafone managed the network in the West of the UK and O2 in the East. This has meant O2 performance is really poor in the area managed by Vodafone, and equally Vodafone is bad in the area managed by O2. You can see the split on this map: https://pedroc.co.uk/content/vodafone-o2-beacon-1-and-2

[Roger_Gooner]

According to Ofcom's reports O2 is not noticeably worse than the other three operators.

https://www.ofcom.org.uk/research-and-data/telecoms-research/mobile-smartphones/mobile-matters 

[cje85]

In other tests it constantly performs poorly:

https://www.nperf.com/en/awards/gb/2020/mobile/united-kingdom/

https://www.speedtest.net/awards/reports/2021/2021Q3Q4_3_UnitedKingdom_5GMobile.pdf