Give your phone’s signal a boost
Jim Martin’s tips will improve the reception on your mobile
When you live and work in a big city, it’s easy to forget that not everyone in the UK enjoys great mobile coverage. Depending on your mobile provider, some rural areas have little to no coverage at all, so what can you do if you have poor mobile reception at home? Here we outline your options.
Alternatives to a mobile network for calls and texts
Before we get to signal boosters, which is probably what you were expecting to find, let’s talk about
alternatives because these are your real options. Most UK households have fast enough broadband for Wi-Fi calling. There’s really no difference between Skype and what most mobile operators call Wi-Fi calling. It’s simply a phone call which uses the internet instead of the mobile phone network.
You can check if your provider offers Wi-Fi calling, but it’s also important that your phone does too. If one or both turn out to be incompatible, you could simply use Skype instead. Skype is available for most phones and it’s completely free.
Chances are that the person you want to call already has a Skype account, but if not, it’s quick and easy to create one, install the app, log in and receive (or make) a phone call over Wi-Fi. Skype allows you to call phone numbers as well, for a fee. That’s useful if you have poor signal but your recipient doesn’t and isn’t willing to install Skype – or it isn’t appropriate to ask them to install it, such as if you’re calling a business or customer service centre.
There are, of course, plenty of alternatives to Skype, such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Viber. So if you already chat with someone using one of those apps, you can also call them over Wi-Fi.
However, you can’t expect the other person to be connected via Wi-Fi at the exact moment you want to call them, which is why all the UK’s main networks offer Wi-Fi calling.
O2 has the TU Go app (tinyurl.com/jk2s3uL), which lets you do extra things such as checking voicemail and sending texts, while EE has Wi-Fi calling (tinyurl.com/zuwd45L), though only to
pay monthly customers, and only on certain phones. It’s pretty much the same situation with Vodafone’s Wi-Fi calling (/tinyurl.com/h5tqqyj), which supports only certain iPhones and Samsung Galaxy phones. Three – like O2 – offers its inTouch app (tinyurl.com/h68a3fw) so even those without a phone compatible with Wi-Fi calling can call and text without a mobile signal.
Switch networks
This may sound extreme but if you have a terrible mobile signal at home, why not switch to another provider? It’s very easy to switch, and you can just as easily take your existing number with you by asking your old provider for a PAC. You then give this code to your new provider and they arrange to transfer your number.
But how do you know if another provider will offer a better mobile signal? Well, you can check each provider’s claims for coverage at a particular postcode using their coverage checkers. Each will tell you whether the signal will be good outdoors as well as indoors.
EE: tinyurl.com/z59oce9 Three: tinyurl.com/jssn2up Vodafone: tinyurl.com/zt6stzr O2: tinyurl.com/gq6sqky
But you don’t have to rely on claims. To make sure you’re happy before you switch, simply request a free pay-as-you-go SIM from a provider and try it out for a month in a spare phone (or even in your main phone). It’s likely to cost around £10 for a month’s use, but this is a small price to pay to fix poor coverage.
Most SIMs are now all-in-one, so you pop out the size you need for your phone. You’ll have to use the SIM’s new phone number for the trial, but at least you will have a very good idea of whether the coverage is significantly better than your old provider or not.
If not, try another provider until you find one with the best signal.
Mobile phone signal boosters
If you find that you can only get reception in one room in the house, or by walking down to the bottom of the garden and standing on a bench, then a signal booster could help.
One way to improve your coverage is to use a mobile signal booster. However, be very careful what you buy. As you’ll find on Ofcom’s website most of the devices you can buy online are actually illegal to use.
You can approach your mobile provider and ask if they will supply (or sell you) a repeater, but we’ve found that unless you’re a customer on a monthly
contract, they tend not to be very helpful. If you do end up having to pay for a booster out of your own pocket, they can cost from £70 up to around £350 and there are no guarantees they will solve the problem. If you do want to go down this route, it’s best to go with the option offered by your network operator rather than buying a box from a third-party. Just because a website is called o2signalbooster. co.uk does not mean it is the official supplier for O2 signal boosters.
Here are the web links, so you can find out more about the different options offered by the four main UK network providers:
02 Boostbox Service tinyurl.com/ju3Ld9s
EE Signal Box tinyurl.com/gLL9d56
Three Home Signal tinyurl.com/j8zsqcc
Vodafone Sure Signal V3 tinyurl.com/hfnov3a
Some of these devices create a mobile signal by using your home broadband, while others repeat a weak signal.