5th Nov 2014 15:01
LONDON (Alliance News) - The UK Government's Department of Culture, Media and Sport Wednesday outlined plans to crack down on poor mobile coverage across the country, including potentially allowing users to roam onto another phone network's signal.
The department has been in talks with mobile operators in recent months in the hope of seeking a voluntary solution to the problem, but has yet to get agreement. It will continue these discussions alongside a consultation on legislative options.
The UK's mobile coverage is patchy, with large cities like London getting almost full coverage, but rural areas in particular suffering from areas with poor or even no signal.
The proposed options put forward by the government include national roaming, allowing mobile networks to put transmitters on each others masts, reforming virtual networks, and obliging networks to cover a certain percentage of the UK.
Culture Secretary Sajid Javid said there are so-called 'partial not-spots', which have coverage from some but not all of the four mobile networks. Depending which network customers are on, they may not get a signal.
"It can?t be right that in a fifth of the UK, people cannot use their phones to make a call. The government isn?t prepared to let that situation continue. We?ve been talking to the mobile companies about the problem and they are working with us to find a solution," Javid said in a statement.
A report by OpenSignal, also released Wednesday, showed that Hutchison 3G UK Ltd, or Three, has the best 3G coverage in the UK, while Vodafone Group PLC has the worst. However, Vodafone has the fastest 4G speeds, and Three the slowest. EE was shown to have the best 4G coverage.
The report also found that 4G speeds in the UK had almost halved in the last year as more people signed up to 4G.
Vodafone has pledged to use some of the billions of pounds it got from its sale of its stake in Verizon Wireless to improve its 3G networks around the world, and to expand its 4G networks.
Vodafone said in April that it planned to invest GBP1 billion during 2014 in its UK networks and services, boosting indoor and outdoor coverage of 2G, 3G and 4G services to 98% of the UK's population by 2015.
By Hana Stewart-Smith; [email protected]; @HanaSSAllNews
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