Get a PAYG sim, whatever network has the cheapest one on offer, then try it where you live. If the signal is shit, use the credit and try another
If I wanted to be lied to, I would watch the news. According to the last signal checker I used when I lived at my previous place, I should have had perfect coverage but it was absolutely appalling (eg: that was the location of the 49 attempts to complete a 1.25 hr call)
Then to be certain, narrow it down to a few plans that appeal & then buy a cheap £5 sim for each and see how they work at you various locations. By process of elimination & £15ish quid you should know first hand which one works best.
I live in a dip in the middle of a village, and my phone usually displays "no service" or maybe 1 bar in my house. It gets a bit better when I am outside the village and, oddly, isn't too bad when I go off shooting or take the dog for a run in the fields. However, performance is generally below average everywhere and fiends and colleagues have remarked that I seem to have a lot more problems with signal and call dropping than other people they know, and that has been the case for a long time despite changing phones (albeit still iPhones) which suggests it's an issue with O2.
That's kind of why I tend to use WhatsApp for calls tbh, as WiFi should be more reliable. Unfortunately, that is not always the case as WhatApp calls also suffer from a fair amount of distortion and frequently the other person just disappears and I get a repetitive double beep at 10 second intervals, during which time they can hear me (usually effing and blinding) but I can't hear them.
Are you still relying on the mobile signal at home, or connected to WiFi via your broadband ? Should be ok if it’s on broadband WiFi. how about borrowing another phone to try, to rule out a problem with your phone ?
Can’t help, where I live is a mobile black hole, tried Vodafone, EE, O2, Plusnet, iD none are any good, have to go to the corner of the back bedroom to get anything near to a reliable signal. So I’m with the cheapest, iD £5 month 500min, unlimited txt 1GB with rollover. My advise to you is to find a network that works for you first then look to the cheaper carriers who piggyback off that network for the best deal?
Vodaphone are quite happy to take your money and being a customer for 10 years and when I hit a crisis couldn’t care less and wouldn’t allow me to go through their crisis care team then forget to tell me I needed a PAC code and left me phoneless going into my stem cell transplant with my brother having to call them and go out and buy me a phone while I was an hour and half away from home I would never use them again ever!!
I've been on O2 with our work contract for years and it's pretty shit especially when travelling down the M1 That said the iPhone 8 I had was faulty and improved substantially with the XR, now the 11 I have is on par with that. Unfortunately iPhones can occasionally have faulty antenna and / or signal related issues. But even still O2 is pretty crap. Now when I visit the family in Australia I buy a 3 mobile sim because the data and roaming plans (especially that side of the world) work out brilliantly. Each time I've got home the signal has been extremely good, but I only run them until it's time to go back to work, at which point I pop the O2 sim back in and instantly regret it I'd suggest a 1 month rolling 3 mobile sim only contract to try, you can't get out of them easy and you get bags of data so whatever happens you'll get your money worth I'd not hesitate to give them a go if I had the option full time
If you live in unfashionable place with virtually no reception outside and none inside, as I do, I've found EE OK. But they provide landline phone, internet and mobile. It all goes through BT landlines at home, but EE like to pretend that they make it happen - until it goes wrong when they blame BT! So, my mobile reception in my house is very good because the phone uses my internet connection for calls. I started buying various companies' sims to experiment with, on my unlocked mobile when I used to travel by train to London a lot. Conclusion: they are all fine in towns but all shit outside towns! So, if it was me, I would get my phone unlocked, if it is not already, and try PAYG sims with different providers, to see which one works best for you. Don't believe any of their advertising - I can tell you, with confidence, that it is all BS! Their coverage maps are BS, as well!
My Daughter found 3 to be awful as do many of her friends, I swapped her out to Vodafone first as that was her preferred network. We don't live out in the sticks though and her commute by train to College is pretty built up areas.
I often use my LL for outbound calls at home as I have unlimited call allowance, but inbound calls go to my mobile. I suppose I could set something up but I know myself and I WILL forget to turn forwarding off when I leave the house. Also, my (suspected) ADHD means I can't sit at a desk all day and so I'm often not in the actual house itself and am outside fooling around with the dog or in the workshop at the bottom of the garden wreckpairing one of my motorbikes.
I'm getting a second phone anyway, and might try my current sim in it to rule that out. But tbh, the problem has persisted across several different phones.
Tbh Viv, most companies are heartless and will take whatever opportunity they can to trouser your money and then leave you lying in the dirt when you need them.
Fair enough. Only mentioned it as after an lOS update my iPhone wouldn’t recover from a lost signal without a reboot. Called Apple as it was under warranty, they were going to give me a new phone rather than admit it was an IOS problem. A further update a week later cured it.
I think you can set the call forwarding from your mobile. So it will always ring first and then switch to your LL if you don't pick up. So no real problem.
Mine does a weird thing where it loses contact with the wifi (though the wifi icon is still showing) when I go to a certain spot in the kitchen and even when I move to another part of the house, I need to de-select and re-select wifi in order to reestablish a connection. My pet and probably incorrect theory is that because the wifi projects towards the kitchen door, and that door is next to a window, there may be some sort of double slit interference effect* going on where the waves are cancelling each other out. No idea why my phone won't reconnect to the wifi when I leave that area though. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment
