Vodafone earned a fine for its rotten customer service, but it can now claim bragging rights as the best data network in three cities, as well as the lowest overall latency and ping rates on 4G. Tutela's latest crowdsourced network survey for May shows Vodafone narrowly ahead of the other big UK networks for packet trip time …

Chinese brands have been eyeing Western markets for some time, but in the UK customer inertia means many punters stick with what they know. RootMetrics' consumer survey of UK mobile shows just how much. More than half of the UK's big four mobile network customers have been with their carrier for two years or more. O2 …

BT has won a UK Supreme Court battle over who should pay the costs of trademark infringement blocking orders – and it won't be internet service providers. Instead rights-holders must reimburse ISPs for the costs of blocking rights-infringing material, according to Supreme Court judge Lord Sumption. "There is no legal basis …

"Do not think your house is a hide-out, it is a telephone," complained Ted Hughes in his poem Do Not Pick Up The Telephone, and EE is helping bring that dystopian vision to life. The mobile giant today launched a virtualised number service called Smartnumber, which can transfer calls intended for your primary mobile number to …

Millennials are notoriously fearful of handling raw meat – but EE hopes they'll be less wary fondling experimental radio equipment. Bragging rights for 5G have begun, and EE is targeting the Nathan Barleys, Steve Bongs and hipster millennials around Shoreditch. A trial will permit "five small businesses and five homes in the …

Still smarting from last week's dismal annual results, BT today made a raft of announcements for its consumer group, including a converged broadband and mobile network. The BT brand will also muscle into 620 EE high street shops to promote its own consumer products, while the biz said it would bring all its call centres back …

Interview If you can't measure something, does it actually exist? That's a question raised by Dr Paul Carter, founder of the oldest mobile network performance operation, GWS. Carter's company has been doing labour-intensive drive-testing of the networks for over 20 years, which is not cheap, but it is thorough. The more rigorous, …

O2 is enlarging its 4G footprint across Blighty to an extra 1,000 sites, after splurging £205m gobbling up all the available LTE spectrum at Ofcom's recent auction. Places earmarked for the extra coverage include Leeds, Nottingham and London, with 60 sites in the capital currently using the new spectrum after Ofcom made it …

You can stuff your VoLTE and Notched iPhones – bargain-conscious Brits are shunning the big mobile operators for cheap-as-chips virtual network operators instead. The virtual upstarts have not typically offered great deals on expensive flagships, or advanced network features. But they have outsmarted the big four. Which? …

Ofcom has given all four UK mobile operators the go-ahead to bid in the forthcoming 4G and 5G auction, as well as Hull-based fixed wireless ISP Connexin and Airspan Spectrum Holdings, a subsidiary of US outfit Airspan. Spectrum in two bands will be made available through the auction process, which Ofcom expects to start in …

Updated EE customers have been hit by a nationwide data outage this morning, leaving grumbling UK commuters with nothing to mindlessly tap on their way to work. According to Down Detector, problems began around 7am, with reports peaking at around around 9am. Customers appear to be affected across the UK, including in London, …

A review of the UK government's delayed emergency services network intended to replace the national radio infrastructure with a 4G network has itself been delayed by more than half a year. The hugely ambitious project will see the £2.9bn Motorola-owned Airwave contract switched off at the end of 2019 and replaced by the £1.2bn …

EE has improved the reliability of its voice calls after a bumpy transition to an all-IP mobile network, according to network sleuth RootMetrics. The introduction of VoLTE saw EE fall from the top spot in RootMetrics' network ratings for call reliability. Three and Vodafone beat EE in the first half of last year for the …

EE is launching a "shoebox"-sized 4G antenna, which it claims could bring coverage to 580,000 UK homes in rural areas. The 4GEE Home Router contains an external antenna, which can be fixed to the outside of houses and is connected to the 4GEE Home Router in the home via a cable. It is intended for areas receiving poor …

Three's campaign for a spectrum cap on mobile operators has been deemed "misleading" by the UK Advertising Standards Authority for implying it was run by an independent body. Three had wanted Blighty's communications regulator Ofcom to impose a 30 per cent cap on spectrum ownership, having waged a strange campaign last year …

BT's problem child Global Services once again dragged sales down, this time by three per cent in the third quarter of its financial year to £5.97bn. The UK telco fingered its troubled outsourcing division as the "main contributor" to revenue decline in the three months to December 31, 2017, with its sales in the quarter …

Mobile network EE has had a poor start to 2018 – their customer service data centre has been down since yesterday. According to the company, their engineers have identified and are working to solve the problem, but have yet to fix it by the time of writing. The server in question deals with the online "MyEE" webpages, customer …

EE Business Broadband customers will have to make do with old-fashioned paper print-outs for the next eight months because the UK firm's online portal is down. In a missive seen by The Register, folk were informed that the service will be out of action until July "while EE carries out technical improvements". One customer was …