Ofcom has published research on mobile phone call quality from the ‘big four’ UK network operators. It’s used data from mobile analytics specialist RootMetrics to better understand consumers’ experience of making phone calls on the EE, O2, Three and Vodafone networks.
The report includes mobile phone call quality studies as well as data supplied by the networks and research into customer satisfaction.
Ofcom found that overall levels of consumer satisfaction with mobile networks were high (76%) on average, although this varied between 78% in urban areas and 67% in rural parts of the UK.
According to RootMetrics data, 97% of calls on the EE network were successfully connected during the second half of 2013, compared with 95.3% on O2, 94.5% on Three and 92.6% on Vodafone.
55% of people surveyed said they never or hardly ever had to put up with no mobile signal or reception. Conversely, 30% said they suffered such problems at least every week. 69% of people never or hardly ever had a blocked call and 65% said the same about dropped calls. However, a fifth of people said they experienced blocked calls and dropped calls at least once a week.
EE, O2, Three and Vodafone have all agreed to work with Ofcom to develop a common methodology for measuring the rates of calls successfully completed on their networks.
[Ofcom: Consumer experiences of mobile phone calls]
UK data on proportion of 2G/3G calls completed successfully (RootMetrics) H2 2013