VodafoneThree opened with a bold promise: an average 20% speed increase for seven million customers across Three and SMARTY.
The merger between Vodafone and Three UK is being described as a “seismic shift in the UK’s mobile landscape,” but emphasising peak speeds may miss the point that matters most to users.
Opensignal’s analysis shows Three’s customers already enjoy marginally faster average 4G download speeds (30.1 Mbps) than Vodafone’s customers (28.6 Mbps). While any speed improvement is positive, it doesn’t address the primary frustration: inconsistent performance.
What determines whether a mobile service feels good to use is reliability. A high download number is less useful if video calls stutter or uploads fail. Opensignal measures this with an index called “Excellent Consistent Quality,” which tracks how often a network delivers the level of performance needed for demanding tasks.
On consistency, Vodafone is clearly ahead. Opensignal reports that only 68.6% of tests on Three’s network reach the threshold for Excellent Consistent Quality, compared with 75.4% on Vodafone’s network.
That gap is significant. It represents the difference between a smooth, dependable connection and one that can let you down when you need it most. Closing this consistency gap through the VodafoneThree merger would be a major win for millions of customers and could help improve the UK’s overall mobile performance, which currently trails many other countries. For context, Opensignal’s Global Network Excellence Index for Q1 2025 ranked the UK 48th worldwide, behind countries such as Vietnam and Uruguay.
Location will play a big role in how customers experience the merger. Londoners are likely to benefit the most. In the capital, Opensignal data indicates Vodafone’s 4G speeds are nearly 20% faster and Vodafone provides a 15.1% advantage in consistent quality compared with Three. For Three customers in London, access to Vodafone’s stronger network could be transformative.
This pattern is visible in other regions too. Opensignal found Vodafone users enjoy noticeably more consistent performance—by roughly 10–15%—in areas including Wales, Northern Ireland, the North East, and the South West.
So how will VodafoneThree achieve these improvements? The strategy is to allow customers’ phones to automatically switch between the two networks, choosing the best signal available through Multi-Operator Core Network (MOCN) technology.
However, this isn’t instantaneous. The company has acknowledged that the rollout will be far slower than initial suggestions of a “few months.”
A realistic timeline looks like this:
- As of June 2025, just 24 cell sites have been upgraded with MOCN.
- The aim is to increase that number to 10,000 sites by March 2026.
- Reaching roughly 95% integration will take about six years.
- The full project, including sites requiring new hardware, is expected to finish around 2033—roughly eight years in total.
That means whether you notice immediate benefits will depend on whether your local area is prioritised in the MOCN rollout. The long-term goal is a robust, unified network—Opensignal previously suggested this could raise the UK’s coverage experience to be competitive with O2—but it will be several years before the full advantages are widely felt.
(Photo by Christina Langford-Miller)
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