Fair enough.

Around here in Oxford very few places have free Wifi, and I don't spend much time at home or in the office, so I use 3G about as much as Wifi.

Or, I would, if 3's service was more reliable! :-) It goes up and down like a yo yo; when it's up at full strength that doesn't mean any data will actually flow through it; they have weird packet MTU issues depending on which port's being used (and don't report it properly through DHCP), and then there's the deep signal shadows that seem to be in every interesting cafe, especially in the comfy spots! (Not to mention a complete lack of 3 signal in my girlfriend's basement flat, in a supposedly "very good" signal area).

Over in North Wales at my mum's house, the 3 signal varies from 0% in her house, to high strength exceptionally fast data, by walking a couple of metres down the road. Walk a few more metres and it's back to 0% again, not even calls and texts. You can map out the local ripples with a short walk. Unfortunately, they move over a period of minutes, so it's hard to keep a call going :-( Methinks it's a symptom of insufficient frequency diversity.

I've been told recently in a 3 shop that they are merging infrastructure with T-Mobile over the next year, which should improve coverage for both sets of customers. It is the reason 3 have a map claiming their coverage will greatly improve over the coming year. I've seen it written often that T-Mobile's coverage is among the best, so I'm looking forward to that.

Advice on coverage maps from 3, Orange, and probably everyone else:

(a) Don't believe them; they don't show the variability. Oxford is classed as "very good" yet I have signal problems all over the place with 3, and did have to a lesser extent with Orange. It is highly variable. (I dropped Orange due to terribly poor data support 2 years ago). 3's map of the area in North Wales where my mum and grandmother lives shows a great signal, which it is - provided you're standing in the right spot on the right side of the hill. You really do get the 2.8Mbps there. Yet, indoors when visiting people in outlying villages, I found even sending and receiving texts would not be available for hours, and voice calls were out of the question. Despite the maps showing good coverage there.

(b) They are measured in terms of "percentage population covered". *Not* percentage of the places you will visit. In other words, good coverage in high population areas only is what "99% population coverage" means.