Congratulations on a great post with some exceptional research. In light of your comments, we wanted to share with you some of the progress we’ve been making since the Ofcom report from 2009 that you mentioned.

Firstly, you’ll be pleased to hear that we’re the first of the UK mobile networks to put our 900MHz spectrum to even better use by enabling 3G over the frequency, in addition to the original 2100MHz band. We’re expecting this to deliver a 50% capacity increase to our existing 3G network. So far, we’ve rolled this technology out across London, Leeds, Manchester, Swindon and Birmingham, with very promising results.

Our 2G network currently provides voice and data services which are available to 99% of the UK’s population. Our 3G network is available to over 84% of the population, providing voice and high-speed data services of up to 14.4Mbps, which is set to increase to 21Mbps in the coming months. Over the last two years, we’ve invested £½ billion in our network (£10billion to date so far). In 2010, we invested £1million every day, helping us to build hundreds of new cell sites across the UK, and that investment’s increased by 25% for 2011.

The result of all this hard work and investment is reflected in a few ways:

As part of our regular and rigorous network testing, we released results of a comprehensive survey which compared the data speeds of all five UK operators. The tests show that in January 2001, O2 offered the best data experience in 12 out of 13 cities. On average, web page access on O2 was delivered in 1.4 second, over three times quicker than the slowest operator.

We scooped Best Network at the What mobile and Mobile News awards, as well as Network of the Year at the Know Your Mobile awards 2010. We’ve also won the Mobile Choice Award for Best Network, for the third consecutive year.

We’re really proud of what we’ve achieved so far, but we’re disappointed that your personal experience with us has led to your decision to try someone else. Rest assured that our efforts to enhance our customers’ experiences will continue. These include the introduction of O2 Wifi, which we’ve already started to roll out. We’ll have over 14,000 hotspots nationwide by the end of 2014 for you to use for free, even if you decide to stay with Vodafone

We’ve already seen on Twitter that you know where to find us, so don’t hesitate to get in touch if there’s anything you need.

All the best,

Chris
Social Media Team
O2

Firstly, I would like to say how happy we are that you have chosen us! Welcome to our network
If you ever need any help or support during your contract with us, we have loads of help available.
We use social media as a great customer service tool so you can find quick support from us on our Facebook page here http://goo.gl/i4vmF, our Twitter page here http://goo.gl/vDitX or our eForum here http://goo.gl/r3Ko4.

Thanks again,

Heidi
Web Relations Team
Vodafone UK

Didn’t know that 3UK shared sites with T-Mobile.

I share your experience with poor O2 3G coverage and good 2G, but I’m loath to switch, as I’m on a staff tariff via my brother, grandfathered into unlimited data, on a £10.50 a month sim only tariff.

Haven’t tried 3UK, but when using mobile dongles in the North East, T-Mobile is by far the best for me out of the other networks.

I’m currently using a three level solution for my connectivity:

An iPhone 4 on O2 as my main phone.

A ZTE Blade (Orange San Francisco, sub £100) running Cyanogen 7 with a T-Mobile PAYG sim as a backup. Never use it for calls, but T-Mobile do 500MB a month data PAYG for £20 for 6 months, so £40 a year. Take this with me if I think I might need a backup device. Tethering works, but don’t think that’s allowed in the contract, so emergencies only.

A Zoom 4506 3G WiFi Router with PAYG dongles for O2, Vodafone, and T-Mobile. I take this with me if I’m going to need to tether a laptop or an iPad. Bigger than a MiFi, but easier to swap networks via the dongles.

Big, big thank you!

My still unreleased new site is using the Nginx / Apache mix you describe. Pretty easy to set up, and though I’m unlikely to need to handle 1000′s of requests per second, the RAM saving will be very useful, especially as I’m quite likely to go with a VPS hosting solution (so RAM may be quite constrained), and even if I go dedicated again, most hosting providers charge a lot for additional RAM.

Indeed – Node.js uses a similar event based model to achieve it’s performance.

I’m hoping to get the next post done over the weekend so check back soon

Nginx on the other hand seems very stable and I am starting to think I should get this hooked up on some of my servers. I’m really looking forward to your next post about this!