Poor UK Mobile Signals Cause 21% of Brits to Stop Gym Exercises

How about this for an unusual study. A new survey of 2,000 mobile phone using UK adults, which was conducted by Global Wireless Solutions and OnePoll, claims to have found that 21% of respondents stopped exercising at the Gym in order to try and resolve issues with a poor signal. WiFi isn’t much better either.

Granted, on the grand list of important things to know, the mobile phone habits of Gym goers aren’t exactly high up but this is still good for a bit of fun and 1 in 2 UK people do at least claim to visit the gym (we have our doubts). Apparently those who do visit the Gym are often “heavily reliant on their phones” to stream music (34%), record progress on apps (26%), take selfies (20%) or browse social media and the internet (17%).

Despite this the study suggests that “all of the big 4 operators are having trouble extending their networks indoors” to cater for such users. In order to test this GWS’ team of engineers also tested mobile network performance by gathering nearly 13,000 test samples (covering voice and data performance) inside and outside 30 of London’s top gyms (e.g. Pure Gym, Gymbox, Nuffield Health and Bannatyne Health Club).

The results of that testing recorded a 20% drop in mobile network coverage when entering a gym and it takes nearly twice as long to download a song inside gyms compared to outside, which they say could “hinder momentum when exercising” (funny I never have that problem when the tracks change, which usually gives you a short pause).

Similarly, network reliability noticeably decreases indoors, as nearly 4 out of 50 data tasks fail inside gyms. One central London location has only a 37% success rate for data tasks and only a 15% call setup success rate for voice calls inside – compared to 92% data and 100% voice success rates respectively when outside. As a general trend, 1 in 10 calls also fail inside gyms compared to a much stronger performance outside (only 2% fail).

As a result of all this 20% of respondents said they felt forced to go outside to use their phones due to poor connectivity inside and a further 21% stopped exercising to try and sort out their phone’s network problems while at the gym. Overall 27% of gym-goers say that difficulties accessing the internet in the gym annoys them, with a further 19% claiming that they would switch gyms if theirs didn’t have a good mobile signal.

As for WiFi, some 14% said that the very first thing they do when they get to a gym is search for a network, but GWS’ engineers struggled to get connected to WiFi in a number of the gyms they tested. Consumer polling results also mirror this as 17% say that they have not been able to get onto their gym’s WiFi network.

Once connected to WiFi, GWS engineers also discovered that download speeds are worse on average than on Mobile, with speeds slowing by 32% for download tasks.

Dr Paul Carter, CEO of GWS, said:

“Phone connectivity has become an integral part of our fitness routines – whether we’re using our phone to record progress via apps, post selfies to social media sites or stream music. It’s interesting to note that mobile network speeds inside gyms are close if not better at times to WiFi, but it still isn’t good enough if consumers are being forced to stop working out to check on connection issues.

Overall, while it’s exciting to see that mobile networks in the UK are deploying new technologies including 5G, there is still a lot of work that needs to be done to improve basic reliability indoors – particularly as our research shows that people opt for reliability over speed at a two to one ratio when choosing a mobile network.”

In fairness some responsibility must also reside with the gym owners, since mobile network operators can only do so much to improve poor indoor signals but they can’t work miracles. By contrast gym owners could consider deploying femtocell style signal boosters (offered by most of the major operators) or at least improving their WiFi so that WiFi calling and VoIP are better served.