In our family we started out with what was then Eurotel, and everyone in my family has O2 except me, because I pay my phone bills myself. Nobody here except me uses mobile internet. I chose T-Mobile as my carrier because the plan was simply tempting, and even now I would rather not cancel it, and I keep going back and forth, one moment yes, the next no. The only problem with T-Mobile is its coverage with fast mobile internet. With VF I don’t have to worry about it, there I have 97% of the area covered by LTE, 1% by 3G and 2% by EDGE. The phone lasts much longer when it doesn’t have to keep switching from one type of network to another, the way it “works” with T-Mobile in Ostrava and far and wide around it.
On top of that, 3G is considerably more demanding on the phone battery than LTE at the same transfer speed. I don’t know whether O2 is to blame – you see, O2 and T-Mobile agreed to share and build all types of networks – T-Mobile takes Bohemia and O2 takes Moravia and Silesia – roughly. There is a map at https://dotekomanie.cz/2014/02/tmobile-o2-sdileni-4g/ . At first it was only the LTE networks, but later the 2G and 3G networks were merged as well: https://smartmania.cz/o2-a-t-mobile-se-dohodli-na-spolecnem-sdileni-2g-a-3g-site-vodafone-zustava-sam-5602/ . And that’s not all.
O2 is doing so poorly that it isn’t building LTE in the Moravian-Silesian region at all. LTE is something O2/T-Mobile really have almost nowhere here. Occasionally 3G, and villages covered by 2G. I don’t know whether it’s my phone, but if there are LTE transmitters for O2/T-M here, they are badly “tuned“. On LTE from Vodafone I also often have 0 bars, but it’s still LTE, rather than switching me to a different network type every 10s and cycling through every single one that exists here within a minute. And besides – VF is the only network operator with a truly solid and comprehensive range of prepaid cards.
It’s just a pity, again, that VF, because it came last (back then still as Oskar), has the fewest customers, and therefore the least opportunity for calls within its own network. And I see it with our ADSL internet too. We are 5 km from the edge of the city, 7 km from the center, and the ADSL internet runs at 2 Mbps! Upload 0.2 Mbps. It will never go any faster; lots of people from O2 tried to tune it, and above 2 Mbps the connection kept dropping. This is definitely not how I imagined the year 2015. The worst part is that it will stay this way forever, because we are a sparsely populated area.