Survey Claims 54% of UK Mobile Users Suffer Signal Woes at Home

A new Opinium based survey from Uswitch.com, which questioned a “nationally representative” sample of 2,000 UK adults during February 2021, has found that 54.4% of respondents (equivalent to 29.5 million UK consumers) have suffered from some form of mobile signal “issue” at home, and it’s worse in rural areas.

The survey claims that 27% of respondents have had to move to another room because of poor mobile reception, while 19% opted to use a messaging service instead (WhatsApp or iMessage etc.) and 14% simply left the house in a bid to get a better signal.

When mobile users asked their network operator for help with reception issues, some 37% were told to try making calls over their Wi-Fi instead (i.e. many Smartphones can send and received calls by routing traffic over a good WiFi connection, such as via your home broadband router). But, although 39% of mobile users regularly use Wi-Fi Calling, more than a third of consumers (35%) still don’t know what it is.

Summary of Survey Highlights

— Reception issues are at their worst in semi-detached houses, with 30% of residents enduring a substandard signal. Thick walls and some types of insulation can interfere with how well the signal reaches phones. In fact, people who have extended their property are more than twice as likely (63%) to suffer constant problems with their mobile reception as those who have not (31%). Meanwhile 41% of those with loft extensions also complained that calls dropped out regularly.

— Rural areas suffer the biggest issues with mobile reception, and are almost 50% more likely than residents in suburban regions to face failed calls. Some 40% of residents living in the countryside complain of dropped calls, which falls to 33% for urban areas and 27% for suburban regions.

— Mobile users most commonly experience problems in the living room (39%), while the bedroom (31%) and kitchen (29%) were next worst, and 10% complained of poor reception in the toilet.

— 51% of mobile users didn’t check the coverage in their area before choosing a provider.

Residents in London, Edinburgh and Belfast are most likely to endure failed calls due to signal issues (18%). Meanwhile, EE topped the table for providers whose customers complain most often about calls dropping out, which is interesting considering that they do so well in various other surveys (e.g. Rootmetrics). Equally, we’re unsure how EE can be the worst, while BTMobile (MVNO for EE) is the best. A bigger sample size was probably needed.

Table: Cities most affected by calls dropping out entirely

Table: Providers whose customers complain most often about calls dropping out

Admittedly 4G and 5G mobile (mobile broadband and calls etc.) connectivity remains an inherently highly variable technology. Users of such services are always moving through different areas, using different devices with different capabilities and the surrounding environment (weather, trees, walls, buildings etc.) is ever changeable.

All of those issues can impact your signal, and that’s before we even consider network (backhaul) capacity or spectrum ownership. People living in urban areas are often surrounded by a much denser mobile network with more spectrum availability, which tends to aid indoor coverage, while rural deployments need to keep costs down in order to ensure maximum coverage and that means using lower frequency bands (these are actually quite good for indoor coverage, but the signals do still get pretty weak over distance).

The new £1bn Shared Rural Network (SRN) industry project, which aims to help extend geographic 4G coverage to 95% of the UK by 2026 (it may also help the 5G rollout too), may help to improve some of the issues mentioned above, but it’s worth remembering that mobile services were always more intended for outdoor than indoor use.