Three SIM Pack: Never thought I'd see one of these again

In the last blog in this series I was impressed with how solid Three’s network seemed across London. Now, obviously life does exist outside of the M25 so here are my thoughts on how their network stacks up after doing some travelling.

(Three are, after all, running their current advertising campaign in order to wipe their image of having patchy coverage from our memories.)

I’ve mentioned before my previous pain with Three. It was a while ago though, back in 2003 to be precise, although they were a young company building a network from scratch. They had even less 3G coverage back then, meaning that you spent a lot of time falling back on to O2 (they have since changed to Orange as the provider of their ‘fallback’ network for Talk and Text). It seemed they wanted to avoid you ending up O2 as much as possible as back then my phone would try to cling on to Three’s 3G as long as possible before dropping your call and registering to O2′s network. As you can imagine, this made making calls a painful process. More often than not I’d have more O2 signal than Three but I’d be lumbered with barely a bar of unusable 3G.

So, how about 2010? Well I’m pleased to say it’s a lot rarer that I see the iPhone bail on to Orange’s network. I’d guess that 70% of the time I glance at the phone it’s got 3G. So it’ll be on Three’s own network. In London it’s probably closer to 90% most of the time, if not more.

Back to outside the capital: I recently grabbed a train from London up to Birmingham, going via the pleasant (and even better, cheap) Chiltern Railways. Now, this journey is mostly rural, serving smaller towns en route than the West Coast Mainline. Firstly, there were regular patches of no signal at all. This though was the case on both O2 and Three. However, I was impressed with how regular the 3G coverage was. Three are clearly making inroads.

Whilst in Birmingham their 3G was also comparable to Orange (on another iPhone). Call quality was good and data speeds seemed nippy enough with perhaps an edge on what I was previously experiencing with O2. With a damn sight more reliability.

Onwards to the North from Birmingham with a trip to the end of the M6 and, ultimately, Scotland. North Berwick to be precise. It’s a bit like the Brighton of Edinburgh. But a lot less developed. And with more golf.

I expected to be sat on a few bars of Orange’s 2G network on my Three iPhone. Yes this is hardly the Hebrides, but my expectations were still that Three would only perform well in big population areas.

I was in for a surprise though - full genuine Three 3G. All 5 new iPhone bars of it. Exactly the same as when sat in my North London flat.

So far, so impressed. When expectations are so low, clearly the only way is up.