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Vodafone is worst rural mobile provider, says research              13/8/14

Vodafone is the worst mobile phone provider for rural areas according to a new report.

The company came out last under research commissioned by telcoms watchdog Ofcom.

The report includes research on mobile phone call quality from the consumers’ perspective on mobile handsets; data supplied by EE, O2, Three and Vodafone on the performance of their networks.

Some 78% of people in urban areas were satisfied with their mobile network, this figure is only 70% in remote areas.

Rural residents experience issues such as “blocked” calls, being unable to make a call even though the phone shows signal, and “dropped” calls, when the signal is lost during the conversation, much more often than city dwellers.

Poor service is evident in rural areas. Half the respondents in remote rural districts said they were unable to make a voice call a number of times a month. 27% said this happened a few times in any week including 14% who experienced the problem daily.  

After getting connected 40% of people said they lost signal during the call a few times a month or more frequently.  

Bottom of the quality service list is Vodafone which failed to connect calls about 20% of the time in rural areas. It achieve 5% connection rates in towns and cities.

The EE rural network did best with over 6% of calls not getting through. Three failed to connect 14% of the time while O2 did little better with a 12.6% failure rate.  

The data shows that the proportion of calls connected successfully varied by provider across the UK, with significantly better performance in urban areas.