[@NickyColman]

Some may have seen my Tweet regarding Three's new coverage problem tool to report any network issues.

Well I used it yesterday to report that I had been having coverage issues for the past two weeks at work at very specific times of the day.

7-9 Full 3G coverage
9-12 Nothing. Zilch. NO SERVICE.
12-2 Full 3G coverage again.
2-3 Nothing again.

I couldnt understand why coverage would go from one extreme to the other. So I gladly logged my problem. They asked for a contact number, which I gave (not that i expected anything from it).

Anyway, today I received a callback from a very polite Indian lady explaining to my that over the past two weeks there have been service upgrades in my area. Apparently the particular cell-site that services my work address had to be taken down at off-peak times to allow for the upgrade.

She asked me if I had better coverage today as the upgrade had just been completed. It had. Full 3G all day.

I thanked her for the prompt reply along with an explanation behind what had caused the network issue. The lady then told me that she would refund me two weeks line rental due to the poor coverage I had received.

Chuffed!

[DBMandrake]

Wow. Impressed, especially regarding the refund.

One thing puzzles me though - should your phone not have roamed to Orange 2G during the outage ? In the last 6 months at home there have been two after midnight 3G outages for around half an hour each, which I assumed were maintenance/upgrades at my local 3 cell tower, and my iPhone happily and automatically roamed to Orange EDGE coverage for the duration. That's one good thing about 3 - in theory you have redundant coverage from Orange at most locations in case of this type of outage. Is your phone locked to 3G only or set to manual network selection perhaps ?

[@NickyColman]

Well thats what I thought, re the roaming to Orange point.

Im not that sure what Orange signal is like at work so perhaps there is no Orange at all. Who knows especially with his whole network sharing thing they've got going on. I have been on....'o' before at work and assumed that was Orange, but only for a few minutes once in a blue moon.

[DBMandrake]

What sort of phone ? o on an iPhone means GPRS, and would indicate roaming to Orange.

[@NickyColman]

Sorry I should have made myself a bit clearer.

I'm using an iPhone yeah, so when it dropped to 'o' I assumed it would be using Orange's 2G network. But it didn't get the chance. I only got sight of the 'o' once or twice before iPhone dropped to No Service.

So I take it that Orange's 2G signal where I work must be so appauling they can't maintain a 2G signal at all. Hence the problem that when Three's 3G signal drops, I'm out of service completely.

[DBMandrake]

Well 3's 3G coverage is getting pervasive enough in many locations now that when you go somewhere populated where you lose 3G coverage from them, you probably won't be picking up any of the other networks either including Orange's 2G, which is still on a relatively high 1800Mhz. That said, I do still rely on the 2G fallback in a few locations - mainly deep inside some large inner city buildings, although the 2G signal is relatively weak in those situations too...(building penetration on 1800Mhz 2G is better than 2100Mhz 3G, but not by a huge margin)

You can check Orange's coverage anywhere - just make sure you have the carrier selection set on automatic and turn off the 3G switch and the phone should roam to 2G within 10 seconds or so. I sometimes do this to check out the 2G coverage in different locations and whether there is GPRS or EDGE.

Because of the way roaming in the iPhone works, if carrier selection is on Automatic (as it must be to automatically roam back and forth between both networks) and you then turn 3G back on again, the phone will first go to No Service (Orange's 3G network rejects the phone) then back to 2G for about 2-5 minutes, then it will automatically reselect 3's 3G network. Don't worry, this is normal...