Talkmobile Deploy Support for Vodafone and Three UK Network Roaming
Customers of mobile provider Talkmobile, which is a virtual operator (MVNO) on parent Vodafone’s (VodafoneThree) national UK 4G and 5G network, have been notified that they too can now “automatically use both the Vodafone and Three networks” (i.e. the new Multi-Operator Core Network or MOCN – detailed here and here).
Just to recap. VodafoneThree has so far upgraded 8,000 UK mast sites to implement MOCN, which enables customers to roam across both networks at no extra cost (whichever one provides the best signal). But it’s expected to take a total of 8 years to fully complete the roll-out of these upgrades (it’ll be 95% complete after 6 years).
Customers who take their mobile services directly from Vodafone or Three UK have naturally been the first to fully benefit, but it’s already known that the plan was to extend this to include sibling virtual operators VOXI, Talkmobile and Smarty too. We had assumed that this was already happening, although the feedback has been quite limited.
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A couple of Talkmobile customers (credits to Zakir and Makky) have now informed ISPreview that they’ve today received the following text notice: “Network update: Starting now, your phone will automatically use both the Vodafone and Three networks to give you more coverage, at no extra cost.” The same message was previously sent out to Vodafone and Three UK’s customers sometime ago.
We believe this change may have technically been live on Talkmobile for at least a few weeks, at least for some customers, thus this may just be more of a belated and administrative confirmation.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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I thought with MOCN all the MVNO had access automatically, is this not the case ?
I guess the other option is that the Talkmobile team just haven’t marketed it as a thing yet, which is a little odd as they seem to be Vodafone under a different name
Not the case MOCN will be available on there sibling virtual operators Voxi, Talkmobile and Smarty.
other Mvno which is not run by VodafoneThree will come at a later time as they wait to get there network running up first on MOCN giving more priority to there network and Mvno they run so they are running smoothly.
I expect non-group MVNOs may require contract changes to their agreement first too, all of which may add some complexity.
It’s at the radio layer, they already had it. Just marketing.
Which I thought so just marketing letting customers know.
Lebara have got it
Do they? How do you know?
> Do they? How do you know?
You can see it’s enabled when your phone uses Three UK’s bands in Network Signal Guru.
Lebara is a Vodafone MVNO.
So Did ID mobile, you can tell (on android at least) from the cell info of the connected cells if you’re on a MOCN site.
I’m on Talkmobile and have had access to some of threes 5G masts for about 2 months now
I’ve noticed for a few months now that I’ve been able to stream music without interpretation when on the way to work on Lebara. While I used to have a few dead spots they have now gone. So I was assuming I was roaming on to Threw. But it could be that Vodafone has recently built a new mast or upgraded another. Just thought I would mention it incase anyone else has had a change in coverage, and hopefully we can put the pieces together to have a educated guess.
Is this only beneficial to Vodafone customers? I am on native three and have a poor signal but cannot access Vodafone mast local to me.
Would make sense why my internet randomly stops working in central London… It’s connecting to Three.