Forum Discussion
I'm with Smarty, hubby is with 3. I have consistently poor signal, he has consistently good signal.
I recently moved from 3 to Smarty. I never had a significant signal problem in 23 years with 3. Since I have been with smarty I have seldom had more than 1-2 bars. Same phone(s) same locations. Checked the apn entries all 'OK' (according to smarty). The only difference is the sim card.
As I type this I have zero signal (a common occurrence) in a location where with 3 I always had more than 3 bars.
It is patently obvious that Smarty customers get a degraded service on the 3 network. In my opinion this amounts to false advertising even though their wording may not be an actual outright lie it is obviously designed to give a very false impression.
Seems you are right and your post has given me answers of many questions. The only option is to use 2 phones at same time to check coverage and signals. I am facing much problem with signals on motorway. Smarty uses 3 network but I believe, wavelength or strength is different. I have checked Vodafone website, even they sell different strengths of signals at different prices it means service providers have options to change quality of signals. Indeed if we are paying less we are not getting good quality.
Some of Vodafone's unlimited tariffs are speed capped but Smarty/Three do not offer this.
Smarty have access to Three's entire range of spectrum (Band 1, 3, 20, 28, 32 for 4G and N78 for 5G). There is no spectrum that is only available to Three customers so the 'wavelengths' used are identical.
Also worth mentioning that the bars on screen are only a very crude indicator of signal strength and do not indicate the signal quality or speed in any way. A phone connected to Band 20 (800MHz) may show 4 or 5 bars but have very poor data speeds due to the limited bandwidth available on Band 20, whereas a phone connected to Band 1 in the same location may only show 1-2 bars but be much faster as more bandwidth is available.
Research I have conducted and other comments online are suggesting that certain 4g frequencies are not supported on smarty. These are the backbone frequencies that are long reaching and good speeds. This shows as nearly always at 4gplus with half mb to 10mb been a familiar occurrence on smarty.
