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The Conservative MP for Tonbridge, Tom Tugendhat, has accused mobile and broadband operators EE, O2 and Vodafone (Vodafone and Three UK) of delivering mobile signals in parts of London that are “worse” than he got in Kabul ten years ago and of operating a “near monopoly“, which he said meant they had “no incentive to improve“.
The very public rant, which was spread across X’s social media pages (here, here and here), appears to have started after the MP found himself in Dulwich, which he said is “one of the more expensive areas of London“, and yet he ended up “getting worse mobile phone reception that I did in Kabul a decade ago“. Tugendhat added that he pays for two contracts via O2 and EE, but complained that “neither is reliable, so I can’t work“.
“Mobile phones are useless in vast areas of Britain and have got worse. You can never work on a train, unlike in France. But we’re spending £4.5 billion in bike lanes and crossings,” said the disgruntled minister. The O2 and EE support feeds promptly responded to express their sorrow at the poor experience he’d had, with O2 (Virgin Media) noting that the “signal can sometimes be affected even when coverage looks strong, for example, by local mast work, temporary faults, or congestion in busy areas.”
However, Tugendhat was having none of that and promptly fired back, first with a fiery response to O2’s support agent: “Don’t pretend this is temporary. This is universal. It’s constant. I’ve spoken to your teams about it in Kent for years and you do nothing. The signal has got worse, but your prices have gone up. O2 is the worst for signal.” The sentiment is no doubt one that many consumers are likely to share.
In the second reply Tugendhat rebutted EE’s (BT) offer to look into the matter further: “You don’t need to look into this further. I’ve spoken to your teams and you now operate a near monopoly alongside O2 and Vodafone. So you have no incentive to improve. You are effectively just a rentier company on the back of the British people.”
Is London mobile really that bad
A number of studies have indicated that mobile network performance in the UK’s capital city may lag behind others in the UK and Europe (here, here and here). But experiences do vary as mobile speeds remain a difficult thing to study, not least because end-users are always moving through different areas (indoor, outdoor and underground), using different devices with different capabilities and the surrounding environment is ever changeable (weather, trees, buildings etc.). All of this can impact signal quality and that’s before we consider any differences in network (backhaul) capacity or spectrum usage between locations.
According to the very latest data from Ookla (Speedtest.net), London is ranked a lowly 88th in the world for mobile broadband performance in cities, achieving a median average download speed of 108Mbps, uploads of 11Mbps and a network latency time of 24ms (milliseconds). By comparison, the fastest city is Al-Rayyan in Qatar, which sees downloads of 665Mbps, uploads of 34Mbps and latency times of 19ms.
The UK’s relatively poor situation tends to reflect a combination of issues, such as the previous government’s U-turn to ban Huawei, which caused a significant and costly delay to network deployments – particularly 5G. Mobile operators have also faced restrictions when it comes to upgrading existing masts to 5G and deploying new ones, although recent rule changes may improve the planning process a bit.
Mobile operator O2 (Virgin Media) last week similarly complained (here) that “outdated planning rules” in London had forced them to switch off “dozens of mobile sites” (not all at once), which they say often leaves busy areas “blighted by poor quality mobile coverage” (i.e. operators are “forced” to remove kit faster than they can replace it).
Speaking of the government, both the past and present governments have had a tendency to set some rather easy population-based coverage targets for the latest services (instead of tougher geographic ones), which is because they mostly end up relying on commercial investment to do the job for them. The current government, for its part, retains an ambition “for all populated areas” to have access to 5GSA (5G+) based mobile broadband by 2030.
The Shared Rural Network (SRN) project and Scotland’s 4G Infill Programme (S4GI) are rare exceptions to the above rule, but neither was intended to help coverage in cities, where we expect private investment to always be the driving force. Suffice to say that while Tugendhat’s individual experiences in London are anecdotal, his very vocal complaints do hold some credible merit and can’t simply be dismissed as a politician playing politics. The catch is that the MP’s own party was effectively in power between 2015 and 2024, thus holding a big chunk of responsibility for today’s situation.
However, the MP’s suggestion that EE, O2 and Vodafone hold a “near monopoly” appears to be less credible, since those three are very much strong and often bitter commercial competitors in the UK market – frequently engaging in competition disputes, legal challenges over spectrum ownership and battling over infrastructure delivery.
On the other hand, there is a lot more mast sharing that takes place today between operators (partly driven by a desire for cost savings and the SRN programme), although each operator still tends to maintain their own independent radio kit etc. Quite a few of those mast sharing agreements also take place alongside independent or semi-independent wireless infrastructure firms, such as Cellnex UK, so they’re not as relevant to this debate.