Hi guys. I recently moved to the country and my signal isn’t great. I do a fair bit of work on the train too so am keen to get as much 4G coverage as possible.
The issues is I don’t want to switch from my current plan to a different carrier in the case that it’s worse.
I’ve consulted the signal maps the carriers provide but it isn’t accurate – at least for Vodaphone, who I’m with.
Is there a clever trick I could be using to test out the other guys?
8 comments
Buy a pay as you go sim, and trial it for a week.
I’m with EE and they are great most places. Though we’re lousy in my train journey to work, a couple of years ago.
Short of asking people on the train, no.
If your phone has dual-SIM support, you could use your normal one and the trial one simultaneously
Use this to look at the coverage for your area [https://bidb.uk/](https://bidb.uk/)
As you say, the maps aren’t perfect, but this one shows you all of the networks. Then get a pay as you go SIM for the network that seems the best but check the deals on [https://uswitch.com/mobiles](https://uswitch.com/mobiles) If you like it, then you can take out a contract if you need to, or you can port the number to any other network to try them.
Get few cheap sims, that use the different networks. Use ’em for a week or so. Decide which one works best, and go for the cheapest appropriate plan from the provider that has the better coverage and speeds. 3 seems to be good at providing service in the dead zones of others. My area is notorious for signal, but a few have discovered that 3 is the only one that works. No one has any explanation for this. Please remember that budget providers don’t give you the speed of the premium services. You’re not going to get blistering internet on Giff Gaff, despite it being on the O2 network. I’m on EE, but as I said, it’s not great here. I have to go into my garden to get more than a single bar, and I live near the centre of a large city.
If you go into the phone settings and turn off automatic network selection you’ll get a list of all the networks the phone can see. This is only of minimal usefulness as it tells you nothing about the available bandwidth etc.
Train journeys don’t tend to have good signal; even in the best coverage areas.I think the tunnels and cuttings disrupt a lot
I wanted to check signal strengths as I was struggling for signal on EE. Their signal tracker had me down as good signal in my house which was utter rubbish.
I used Ofcoms and found it to be pretty accurate. It shows you where the nearest mast is and who’s mast it is. It was also wildly different to the service providers own signal maps.