networks
Comms watchdog says up to 83% of tests fail the 'good performance' threshold
Train travellers are poorly served by the UK’s mobile networks, says Ofcom. Tests on railway lines in England, Scotland and Wales revealed disappointing signal across 24 rail segments, with results falling short in 83 percent of cases. The communications regulator is now calling for a nationwide effort to raise the standard of mobile coverage passengers can expect.On-board Wi-Fi was also tested by Ofcom and it performed well just one percent of the time.
This writer can attest that on train journeys to London, the mobile network signal is often too weak to allow doom scrolling on social media - which is perhaps no bad thing.
Ofcom’s report [PDF] found that even the best performing network (EE) met the Good Performance threshold less than half the time, while Three, O2 and Vodafone could only achieve this between 17 and 21 percent of journeys.For the purpose of the tests, Good Performance was defined as a download speed of at least 5 Mbit/s, an upload speed of at least 1.5 Mbit/s and a response time (latency) of 50 milliseconds or better. This level should allow a passenger to stream video or browse the web without noticeable delays.
