UK Mobile Challenges in 2022

I had thought the roll out of 5G and its adoption would have increased dramatically during the lockdown, but according to various reports between 20 and 30% of the population have access to 5G.?That, of course, means when they are at home and ignores the fact that the technology is mobile.?So your odds of getting 5G on a train or on a motorway (when you’re not driving, of course) are minimal.?Let’s face it, your chances of getting a signal at all in those environments are fairly low.?So given the costs of a 5G handset I think that is a factor in the slow take up.

Once again we are the laggards of Europe.??A report issued late last year shows how far we have fallen behind our neighbours across the Irish Sea.?I have worked in Ireland on a number of occasions over recent years and know that the general population's loathing of Eir probably exceeds how people in the UK feel about BT here. ?Yet Eir now has 99% geographic 4G coverage and 70% of the population has access to 5G. Compare that to the UK where, according to Ofcom, EE has the best 4G geographic coverage at - wait for it - 85%.??There are some very rural parts of Ireland, yet they have managed to ensure near full coverage whilst over 14,000 square miles of the UK has none - including my part of Kent - that’s more than twice the size of Yorkshire.

So the "laggard" epitaph is still valid and we have a long way to go as EE are saying they expect to cover 50% of the population with a 5G signal by 2023.?By then you will probably to go anywhere in Ireland and get 5G.

We also saw last year 3 of the 4 mobile providers reintroduce roaming charges across Europe.?This is despite all of them saying, at the start of 2021, that they had no plans to do so after Brexit was confirmed.?Call me cynical but I suspect they only delayed the introduction because nobody could go on holiday.??The one exception being the new merged Virgin and O2 who have just confirmed they will not introduce them in 2022, so well done to them. A family of 4 going on holiday for two weeks will end up spending ￡100 with the other networks.?For people like myself who regularly work from abroad, the costs could be even higher.?So, for once, I am happy to be with O2.?It will be interesting to see if they gain customers as a result and whether the other three providers eat humble pie.

We also saw all the main networks are trying to circumvent Ofcom rules about people having the right to cancel if a provider rises prices by building into their contracts clauses that say for example prices will go up by CPI + 3.9% every March.??This practice should be banned in my view! In the meantime well done to Tesco Mobile who have clearly stated fixed price means fixed price.??In fact they were the only telecoms company to make the top 50 list of companies providing excellent customer service in an independent report.?They actually came 5th.

The approach of the larger companies seems focussed on how much can we squeeze out the customer, and that is reflected in Trustpilot ratings.??All the MVNOs (virtual network operators) score higher than the 4 networks.??Which, given they suffer the same outages etc, mean the difference can only be down to price and service.???The main networks ranked from 1.3 out of 5 (Vodafone) to 2.2 (EE).?The top 4 MVNOs with their respective underlying networks are shown below

Vectone (EE) 4.8

Superdrug Mobile (3) 4.7

Lycramobile (O2) 4.6

Lebara (Voda) 4.6

I see similar reactions from SMEs who switch to resellers from dealing directly with the networks and experience a better service wrap.