Ofcom has revealed in its latest report that nearly a third of rural mobile users have faced dropped call issued at least once a week with those on Vodafone suffering the most.
According to the report, nearly one in five Vodafone customers – a whopping 20 per cent – in rural areas suffered from dropped and lost connectivity. Nationally 7.4 per cent Vodafone customers complained about such issues.
5.5 per cent users on Three complained about similar issues while 4.7 per cent O2 customers claimed to have suffered from mobile connectivity. Everything Everywhere turned out to be the best of all as just 3 per cent users complained about such issues.
The survey concluded that EE was the best network in rural areas while O2 was crowned the best network for urban calls.
Ofcom found that the overall customer satisfaction for mobile networks is high at 76 per cent. “Some 78 per cent of people in urban areas were satisfied with their mobile network, compared to 67% in rural parts of the UK and 70 per cent in remote areas”, noted Ofcom.
55 per cent of those surveyed said that they never faced ‘no mobile signal’ issues while one third revealed that they suffered from such issues at least every week.
“The majority of people said they never or hardly ever had a blocked call (69 per cent) or dropped call (65 per cent). However, a fifth of people said they experienced blocked calls (20 per cent) and dropped calls (22 per cent) at least once a week, and this increases in rural areas”, added Ofcom.
Ofcom revealed that it is working on its plan to help improve mobile coverage across the UK and that all major mobile operators “have agreed to work with Ofcom to develop a common methodology for measuring the rates of calls successfully completed on their networks”.
