An Ofcom report into mobile call quality has revealed that almost a quarter of UK customers are unhappy with the service they are receiving.
The report includes customer satisfaction levels from EE, O2, Three and Vodafone users on the performance of the operators’ network performance. According to its findings, 76 percent said they were satisfied with their mobile network, with 24 percent of customers left wanting.
The results vary by location. In urban areas, 78 percent of customers were reported to have said they were satisfied with their mobile network. In remote areas the figure is lower at 70 percent, and customers in rural areas revealed the lowest satisfaction rate at 67 percent.
Ofcom also used independent research data from RootMetrics to establish the proportion of customers whose calls were successfully connected.
It found that 97 percent of calls on the EE network were connected, followed by 95.3 percent on O2, 94.5 percent on Three and 92.6 percent on Vodafone.
Again, differences varied depending on location; in rural areas, nearly 20 percent of calls made on the Vodafone network were not successfully connected.
However, separate research commissioned by O2 and carried out by vendor Spirent found no statistically significant difference across the four carriers in terms of successful call completion, which ranged from 98.8 percent to 99.0 percent in its own findings.
Des Owens, Service Experience General Manager at Spirent, said the purpose of the research was to “provide the industry with an independent and accurate view of the user experience [and] measure the key factors that matter to users”.
Ofcom also approached customers about their experience with mobile reception. Fifty-five percent of those surveyed are reported to have said they “rarely” or “never” had issues with their network, while nearly a third said they suffered problems at least every week.
A fifth of those asked claimed to experience blocked or dropped calls at least once a week, with this figure again higher in rural areas.
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