UK phone SIMs worse in Europe?

Guigsy

Guigsy

Joined
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In 2019, we spent 6 months travelling around Europe. We covered Spain, France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Poland, Czech, Netherlands, Belgium. Our phones and the MiFi had pay monthly Vodafone SIMs. We had no issues at all with mobile connections. We could stream video wherever we wanted.

I've just done 2 weeks in mainly Germany, France and Belgium. Still got Vodafone SIMs in our phones, but I put a Plusnet SIM in the MiFi for diversity. We frequently has poor or no connection. Just getting Maps to find an address or Translate to tell us what was on the menu was very hit and miss. It was really frustrating.

We were previously in a PVC, so I had an antenna on the roof for the MiFi. Now in a coach build where there's not as much signal loss, so I've not aerialed-up yet. That might explain the MiFi, but not why we struggled on our phones when out and about. We'd often have a signal, but terrible data speeds.

Have UK phone companies got worse roaming deals with foreign providers than they used to have? Or have we just been unlucky? Or is it just Vodafone?
 
Plusnet in the MiFi was almost pointless. When in the van, it was often better to turn our phone's WiFi off. It could be due to poor reception on the MiFi, but it often said it was connected to 4G with a couple of bars of reception, so it felt like the networks just weren't providing any bandwidth.
 
We use smarty in phones and three in our router and all working well in uk
 
Both our phones are on Plusnet, I've never had any problems & put my sim in the (with roof aerial) in weak signal areas, had 4 G everywhere.
My wife's which is on a newer contract, last year it received a pooer signal nearly always 3G when I was getting 4G. I know other people that had the same problem, but they now appear to have sorted it. Last trip which included France, Belgium, Holland and Germany she received 4G everywhere the same as me.
 
Quite th opposite. Whereas you can get a lot of drop out/bad signal in the UK because generally your phone will only connect the the carrier it belongs to, in Europe the phone will pick up on a whole range of carriers, which ever is best signal.

We are using Lebara (Vodaphone) in Europe now. We've done France, Belgium, Germany, Austria and now Italy. Hardly ever lost reception and can stream BBC, Channel 4, You tube etc. Couldn't do it that reliably in the UK.

Also, this is without any fancy WiFi routers/Ariel's. Just a old phone with portable hotspot switched on.

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Manic said:
We use smarty in phones and three in our router and all working well in uk
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Not in Scotland they don’t. We had loads of no signal to poor signal, very poor data etc even at Strathclyde during our recent 6 weeks away. I was very surprised really.
 
Just done France and Spain EE Plusnet and Lebara all fine. The latter was perhaps weaker in some locations but all worked fine.
 
EE was fine in France Germany Italy and Switzerland this year
 
We've been almost three weeks in France and I've been very impressed by the 4G coverage over here. Far better than at home.
We have a contact with O2 to avoid the roaming charges and it has been superb
 
On terms of getting a signal, I'd normally get 4G and a few bars. Which is the same as 2019, generally better coverage than the UK. But this time I was getting very poor bandwidth. As if I was being throttled, or my traffic was lower priority. Strange.

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Guigsy said:
On terms of getting a signal, I'd normally get 4G and a few bars. Which is the same as 2019, generally better coverage than the UK. But this time I was getting very poor bandwidth. As if I was being throttled, or my traffic was lower priority. Strange.
Click to expand...
Have you tried manually selecting networks, this can help if you pick up a poor one. But have to say our motorhome TV needs ( which are mostly masterchef, F1 and football) are completely taken care of on demand using a firestick, 4g tethering or mifi and having very few problems in Europe.

I havent bothered getting the sat dish fixed because we prefer on demand and most of the places we go are outside 2a footprint anyway.
 
Finding Vodafone very poor in Germany this trip. Latches to Vodafone.de and if I manually try to select another network it times out and fails.
 
Maybe it's just Vodafone then? Which is a pain because I just renewed our contacts.

Vodafone spent a lot of money on Huawei 5G equipment, only to be told to rip it all out. Maybe they are having to cut costs?

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Have our 2 phones with EE and also the sim for the Netgear, did 8 countries in May with streaming a fair bit on 4K tv without issues.
Just come back and we had about 3-4 places in Germany where the reception was crap and we couldn’t watch anything.
EE use 02 in Europe so maybe they had issues.
 
Just done a month covering Holland, Belgium and mainly France. No issues with either of our phones both of which are on Vodafone. Tethered the firestick through them without an issue also.
 
Guigsy said:
Still got Vodafone SIMs in our phones,
Click to expand...
Which Vodafone contract are you on? There are different speeds depending on which you signed up for.
 
Minxy said:
Which Vodafone contract are you on? There are different speeds depending on which you signed up for.
Click to expand...
They are SIM only pay monthly with almost all the nobs on. 250GB of data in Blighty (limited to 25GB abroad). I'd expect to not be limited.

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