Sajid Javid MP, the UK Government Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, has announced what’s described as a “landmark deal” with the ‘big four’ mobile networks to improve coverage.

It follows a three-week consultation period that involved the government proposing mandated ‘national roaming’ as one of the options to improve rural coverage in areas where some networks provided service but others didn’t.

It's time for another news-packed mobile industry podcast from TheFonecast.com, starting with the European Parliament's latest ruling on in-car emergency communication.

After that we're talking about Microsoft's departure from the Nook eBook business, Three UK's 4G growth, Acer's tablet-sized phone, EE's rural coverage solution and some interesting new research about mobile-enabled customer service.

Three UK says 3.1 million of its customers are now using 4G services, just 10 months after the network launched its LTE technology.

That’s over a third of Three’s 8 million customers.

A new survey from testing services company P3 communications has ranked EE as the ‘best in test’, noting that it offered the best national data performance.

Three was ranked second overall but had the best voice performance in the test.

Ofcom has published its first research into the consumer experience of UK mobile broadband services since the 4G auction last year. The regulator’s own engineers conducted around 210,000 tests of 3G and 4G services on smartphones in Birmingham, Edinburgh, Glasgow, London and Manchester between March and June 2014.

Download speed, upload speed, web page loading times and latency were all measured.