Compared to Orange/EE, o2's signal is crystal clear brilliance.
Although to be fair to Orange/EE, their signal was good until EE brought out their 4G. Suddenly the 3G didn't work in huge chunks of north London. Just fancy that folks!
I have an HTC One M7 that I've just finished paying for. I intend to flog it into the ground and then get another HTC. I'll give the HTC Ten a year or so to come down to a sensible price.
Until recently, O2 was using a half rate codec to manage demand - meaning quite
horrid voice quality. EE, Vodafone and Three has been using HD voice (a codec not far off that of CD quality audio) for some time (handset support required). Now O2 is introducing HD voice too, but others are now offering inter-operator connectivity.
O2 is a long way behind, partly due to the fact that Telefonica wanted rid of it and hoped Three (or anyone) would buy it. Now that's not been allowed, there are signs O2 will spend more money that it failed to do for so many years. It had the worst 3G coverage of any network, followed by Vodafone - another company that rested on its laurels while Three and EE (Orange/T-Mobile) was actually building out more sites AND upgrading capacity at existing ones.
4G is another layer on top of 3G so it should have had absolutely no effect on service on EE, although it depended if you were an EE customer, former T-Mobile customer, or Orange customer for a while. Until they properly merged everything, many Orange users were roaming and there were some issues. But they were roaming on sites that wouldn't have been available if the networks hadn't merged.
In the future, 3G spectrum will be re-used for 4G but that's a way off on EE as it has so much capacity already. EE will switch on its 800MHz network and by 2020 have 99% geographic capacity. Most, if not all, sites will be fibre offering speeds of up to 600Mbps (not the 800 sites, mind).
Vodafone is reusing 3G for 4G now though (UMTS 2100 becomes LTE 2100) and also has a lot of capacity. It has a way to go, along with O2, to catch up with EE.
My last HTC was the M8. I'm surprised HTC is still in business. Sales this year were down again, so who knows what will happen in 2017.
) EE, of course, denied anything was wrong and wouldn't refund. It'll be a cold day in hell before I go back to EE, no matter how much they try and annoy me into submission with Kevin "am I really reduced to this?" Bacon.