So I was having my phone replaced again the other day when I stumbled upon the Vodafone shop and for a long time I’ve said to my self when I upgrade to a new phone it will be on Vodafone because I am fed up of the poor network coverage I get on O2 and the eleged speed improvements on Vodafone. I decided that with this in mind I would take out a new SIM from Vodafone, I have a pay as you go SIM with £10 credit which I used to buy a bolt-on for data use, I am going to be posting a summary on my opinions at the end of the month when it runs out, because I want to see how much better or worse the Vodafone network was for signal coverage, 3g coverage, speed and reliability.

I already now have 3G in my house rather than GPRS, although Vodafone’s network does not use EDGE as far as I know so it really will be 3G or nothing.

I am going to be using the SpeedTest.Net tool in a few key places, and I am most interested to learn how the signal will fluctuate on my journey to work in London because normally I lose signal on O2 between Fanborough and Brookwood because of big hills, At Weybridge for the same reason, and around Clapham Junction and Surbiton for no apparent reason except the network is overloaded or not there at all.

I also want to see how it fares on the tube as I can often get O2 right the way from the escalators in most tube stations so will Vodafone be better? Also another thing that annoys me is the fact that the network seems to drop the call when it runs out of signal then instantly reacquire full signal on the next cell rather than switching, apparently this could be my phone or the network being overloaded and not switching the call quickly enough before it terminates.

I am also interested to see if the speeds are better because Vodafone hasn’t been hit for the last 2.5 years by the iPhone data effect where as O2 has.

We shall see!