The audience welcomed the regulator’s recognition of the need to improve mobile coverage and quality, and its renewed approach to addressing the challenges at hand
The Three/Vodafone merger is having a positive impact on the market, and will continue to deliver benefits over the long-term
On 3 September 2026, in London, Ofcom and the Institute of Telecommunications Professionals (ITP) hosted a mobile connectivity seminar to discuss the regulator’s ongoing work on reporting mobile coverage, how it protects consumers during the transition from legacy technologies and its ambitions for better and more resilient networks. Professor Andy Sutton MBE (Director of Technology and Mobile, Ofcom) opened with a broad overview of Ofcom’s three-phase strategy for mobile connectivity:
Strengthening the market through the Three/Vodafone merger;
Making connectivity quality more visible with the updated Map Your Mobile (MYM) tool, Ofcom’s mobile coverage quality checker for consumers; and
Tackling remaining gaps with performance ambitions and targeted work on improving connectivity in busy urban areas, public buildings, trains and rural places.
Sutton praised the impacts of the Three/Vodafone merger, arguing that it is benefitting the market as a result of the merged operator’s £11bn investment commitment and the reallocation of spectrum to Virgin Media O2. He also highlighted Ofcom’s expectation that non-terrestrial networks (NTN) such as satellite services will close any final connectivity gaps, whether that be in dense urban, rural or remote areas.
Mobile connectivity is not where Ofcom wants it to be, but the regulator is now tackling the problem head-on
Ofcom’s approach to measuring and trying to improve mobile connectivity was detailed across two different sessions. Ammar Ghazal (Spectrum Engineering Manager, Ofcom) and Esther Kithuka (Senior Data and Policy Analyst, Ofcom) first covered the technical details of the regulator’s methodology, which takes in operator signal strength prediction submissions and applies signal strength thresholds to them in order to convert them into estimates. Signal strength estimates are then aggregated to the UK’s different geographies (e.g. urban, rural, areas with different population densities), before outputs are published annually in Ofcom’s Connected Nations report.
Later in the morning, Simon Burley (Principal, Tech Policy, Ofcom) gave a comprehensive view on Ofcom’s recent work to improve mobile connectivity. Burley focused on Ofcom’s target of guaranteeing consumers can experience “good” performance (>5Mbps download speeds, >1.5Mbps upload speeds and <50ms latency) at least 90% of the time, with such performance currently only being available 79% of the time. Burley referred to the regulator’s recent discussion paper on this issue, which was supplemented by three other reports that collated data on connectivity on trains, consumer experiences and a case study on connectivity in Greater Manchester. Sutton was similarly keen to talk about this work, and the feeling in the room was a positive one – that Ofcom has recognised the connectivity problem and is now taking a new approach to it. Burley stressed the importance of the new MYM tool’s accessibility for consumers and explained the challenges in balancing the depth of information available in the tool while keeping it easy to understand. Burley also mentioned MYM’s ability to strengthen competition on quality, and said Ofcom was working to find better ways of using its new crowdsourced data to encourage such competition via its mapping.
Ofcom warned about the potential impacts of the 2G switch-off on IoT devices used across CNI sectors
Marcus Wilson (Policy Manager, Ofcom) gave a brief update on how Ofcom is approaching and supporting the upcoming 2G network switch-off. Wilson emphasised the potentially more significant impact of the 2G switch-off relative to the now completed shutdown of 3G services due to the large amount of Internet of Things (IoT) devices that are still reliant on the network. He gave specific reference to the importance of upgrading devices in critical national infrastructure (CNI) sectors such as healthcare, where telecare devices provide vital connectivity, often for more vulnerable consumers. Wilson also discussed Ofcom’s and the Government’s roles in the 2G switch-off process with these mostly being supervisory. Ofcom is tasked with monitoring operators’ plans and ensuring these do not harm consumers, while the Government’s March 2026 2G switch-off charter set out voluntary commitments for industry, including publicly announcing switch-off start dates with at least three years of notice, providing tailored and accessible communications to affected customers ahead of time, and publishing general guidance to assist the identification of devices still using 2G.
