Tom, I agree!
The other day, I was returning home from a training course, travelling on a commuter train from Glasgow to Ardrossan.
The first two thirds of this route is a mainline railway connecting:
Glasgow, population 632,350
Paisley, population 79,369
Johnstone, population 15,930
Glengarnock [for Kilbirnie], combined population 7,780
Dalry, population 5,250
Kilwinning, population 15,908
Despite that, once the train departed Paisley, the signal was either:
4G 2 bars
4G 1 bar
E 2 to 3 bars
I'd say, on average, the phone was displaying 4G with 1 or briefly zero bars on display. I was trying to access fairly simple webpages, nothing graphics rich but, as so many people are now experiencing, the browser kept grinding to a halt.
I had earphones plugged into the USB-C socket via an adapter and they were picking up the vintage 900/1800 MHz "chirrup chirrup" sound while I was doing nothing except listen to music stored on the phone, i.e. the phone had gone to 2G and was doing base station handshakes.
You summed it up so succinctly when you said, "This is a huge problem, and isn’t just affecting a few. Vodafone should be honest with their customers.". At least there is currently still 2G so I could still make calls and send SMS texts but I don't know how the younger generations would cope, having grown up with apps like Facebook and Instagram. I imagine those don't work well on 2.5G Edge! What will happen when 2G is eventually switched off? Will 4G and 5G have had the many notspots covered by then?
If Vodafone just messaged all customers and said, "There's a problem, we know it, we're sorry, we're working on resolving it!", I'd admire their honesty and like them more for being open about the issue.
