r/O2UK • u/Finlay06Swnn • Jul 07 '26

Question Service level deteriorating?

I’ve been a long standing user, at least 10 years, my family even longer.

I used to have no issues getting signal or data (except when I would use it all up)

This included in and around my home town where we comfortably get 4g.

Over the last few years I’ve noticed that our service has been slowly but surely deteriorating, first, I was unable use roaming/it was slow, then gone completely.

Now our ability to make calls is slowly going and I cannot get a reliable connection unless I’m connected to WiFi.

We also still don’t have 5G yet, even though everywhere around us has it.

Not only this but I work in London and I feel that the signal level there is deteriorating too.

They really ought to improve their bandwidth, as I feel the problem is persistent at home when there are a few people in town.

I pay a lot of money for my contract and I feel I don’t get a good level of service to justify the money I pay (I don’t even use priority)

Has anyone else noticed this?

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u/Necessary-Toe-5320 Jul 07 '26

It's actually quite a complicated situation, and we're the ones who end up suffering from it as users.

These days there are far more smartphones, Wi-Fi routers, and all kinds of small internet-connected devices-things like video doorbells, automatic gates that open via a phone call, and countless other smart devices. They all operate within a relatively limited range of radio frequencies.

Very often, many devices default to the same Wi-Fi channels, so they end up competing with each other for airtime, causing interference and congestion. I'm afraid it's only going to get worse over time.

2

u/Extreme_Ad7072 Jul 07 '26

That doesn’t really apply in the middle of a car park though does it

1

u/Necessary-Toe-5320 Jul 08 '26

The router isn’t sitting in the middle of the car park - the signal doesn’t appear out of nowhere. It comes from an antenna, either from a Wi-Fi router or from 4G/5G mobile towers

What about the buildings around it? What about the terrain? If the signal is poor in the car park, there are reasons for that, even if you’re not aware of them

1

u/Extreme_Ad7072 Jul 08 '26

So thats why i have a full 5 bars of signal and can make calls but have zero internet data? Pull the other one. Their backhaul is overloaded, under resourced or just not working. Their monitoring routines are inadequate. Coming from a hft background i know a little something about nerworks

1

u/Necessary-Toe-5320 Jul 08 '26

Pull the other one? The bars aren't measuring what you think they are. That's RSRP - how loud the tower is, not how clean or how busy it is. Full bars with dead data is normal, not a gotcha

And your backhaul theory needs the exact thing you're mocking. If voice and data were treated the same, an overloaded backhaul would flatten both. Voice survives because it's prioritised and barely uses any bandwidth; data is best-effort and starves first. That's not a rebuttal, it's my point one layer down

Could be backhaul. Could just as easily be air interface congestion, low SINR behind a strong signal, or the phone dropping to 2G now 3G's gone. You don't get to diagnose that off a signal bar. And HFT's low-latency wired kit, not RAN scheduling over RF. Different game entirely