Originally Posted by RichX

This may not so much be 'coverage' but more network congestion, which is commonly talked about for Vodafone customers as being an issue.

So what is it we are actually talking about here, signal quality/coverage from the cell towers, or data backhaul capacity/bandwidth for 3G data from cell towers back onto the Internet?

It's hard to tell what kind of type of connection hooks the cell tower back onto the Internet. However, i would say it would be likely that some cell towers may hold upwards of 5000 customers each in CBD areas, which would require a bare minimum of 100Mbps onto the Internet.

Given the rapid growth of 3G, which is basically giving your phone an IP address, it wouldn't take long to saturate that 100Mb and create poor data flow from that particular tower.