Mobile operator Three (3) has complained to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) about a claim by rival Orange that it covers 93.4% of the UK population with its 3G Mobile Broadband network. Three (3) believes that its own network holds this title and that Orange's claim is misleading.

Interestingly Three (3)'s own statistics sight population coverage of 91%. However the operator told The Times that this would increase to 95% if it applied a different measure used elsewhere in the industry to calculate coverage.

The lack of a common standard to measure coverage will certainly confuse consumers and lead to problems like the one above. Ironically Three (3) has a network sharing agreement with T-Mobile but from next year T-Mobile will merge with Orange, oh what a tangled web.

In reality coverage estimates are always somewhat optimistic and real world performance often differs from the official statistics. We plan to talk about this in more detail next week with an article concerning how Mobile Broadband users can improve their service performance.