Which network operator has the best rural coverage?

If you live and work in a city, mobile network coverage isn’t something you’ll have to worry about.

On the other hand, if your daily commute involves bouncing a 4×4 over cattle grids or negotiating passing places, choosing the best rural mobile network is a necessity.

The countryside is not the friend of phone signals, which are blocked by trees and hills. Distance from the nearest masts can make even receiving calls difficult.

As such, it’s vital to know which of the UK’s big four phone companies delivers the best rural mobile network.

(Don’t be fooled by the presence of brands like Sky Mobile and Tesco Mobile. These smaller operators all piggyback on the networks of either Vodafone, O2, EE or Three.)

Country files

The UK’s patchwork quilt of rural mobile networks was acknowledged in the most recent Ofcom Connected Nations report, published just before Christmas.

The 2019 report concluded only two thirds of the UK landmass received strong outdoor 4G coverage from all four main networks, though this does cover 96 per cent of domestic homes.

Indeed, nine per cent of our green and pleasant land didn’t have any outdoor 4G coverage to speak of.

And while this nine per cent includes mountains, national forests and unpopulated scrubland, it could be argued decent signal strength is even more important in isolated areas.

Only one per cent of England and Northern Ireland were classed as voice and text notspots, whereas the figures for Wales and Scotland were five and twelve per cent respectively.

So which company has achieved the most in terms of establishing the best rural mobile network?

The situation as of January 2020

Anyone concerned with staying in touch in the great outdoors should look to Vodafone or O2, who were able to support voice calls across 91 per cent of the UK’s landmass.

Less impressively, Three and EE achieved around 86 per cent national voice call coverage.

The latter’s figures are a surprise, as EE might be expected to come top in any such survey. It was created by the merger of Orange and T-Mobile, who both had extensive networks in situ.

Following its acquisition by BT in 2016, EE customers can also harness BT’s fibre network and infrastructure. Yet this didn’t improve its performance in Ofcom’s survey.

The same report also suggested rural dwellers wanting indoor 4G mobile coverage would be best served by O2 and its piggybackers, with 95 per cent of UK premises serviced.

By contrast, Three could only deliver that level of service to 89 per cent of households.

In total, 80 per cent of homes across the country receive adequate indoor 4G signals from all four networks.

However, this is unlikely to matter much in the coming years.

Although the 5G revolution has yet to spread beyond towns and cities, low-frequency bandwidth should largely abolish notspots and signal dead zones, as 5G rolls out nationwide.