Manchester City Council
Mobile Connectivity Assessment — 2025
Manchester City Council (MCC) commissioned Inakalum to map mobile coverage and capacity across the entire MCC area, on all four UK national operators. We placed battery-powered NetworkUX kits in Biffa’s waste collection vehicles across two depots and ran the survey while the trucks completed their normal routes. Four weeks. Every street covered at least once. Over 2 million datapoints.
- Authority
- Manchester City Council
- Survey window
- 18 Aug – 12 Sep 2025 (4 weeks)
- Datapoints captured
- 2M+
- Networks measured
- EE · Three · VMO2 · Vodafone
- Fleet partner
- Biffa (Longley Lane & Hammerstone Road depots)
“Manchester City Council was seeking a partner to deliver a series of Mobile Capacity Mapping projects. The Digital Strategy team was incredibly impressed with NetworkUX’s track record of working with other local authorities on similar projects and knowledge of the mobile infrastructure landscape in the UK.
Whilst working on the project the team at NetworkUX were very professional, personable and timely in communication and delivery of results. The data we received was presented in an easily legible format with ability to tailor and produce reports to support our project aims.
Overall, the experience of working with the team at NetworkUX and the product delivered was exceptional in quality and delivery. I would recommend NetworkUX to any party interested in gathering data on mobile capacity.”
An entire major UK city — mapped in four weeks.
Manchester is the second-largest city in England by metropolitan population and one of the UK’s defining digital cities. NetworkUX’s bin-wagon model produced a full borough-wide coverage and capacity baseline — every street, on every UK network — in a single month, with no extra fieldwork on top of Biffa’s existing routes.
Two depots, four weeks
Biffa runs the MCC waste service from two depots: Longley Lane and Hammerstone Road. NetworkUX kits ran out of Longley Lane for the first two weeks (18–29 August 2025), then moved to Hammerstone Road for the next two weeks (1–12 September 2025), covering the full MCC footprint between them.
Battery-powered, portable kits
No in-vehicle wiring, no installation, no disruption to Biffa’s operations. Kits are swapped between vehicles at the depot each morning before the fleet departs, targeting specific routes so every street in the MCC area is reached at least once over the survey window.
All four UK networks, side by side
Each kit measures EE, Three, VMO2 and Vodafone simultaneously, under identical conditions, at every metre along the route. The output is a true like-for-like comparison — coverage and performance data for all four operators on the same streets at the same time.
2 million+ geolocated datapoints
The full output: over 2 million signal and performance measurements, geolocated to within metres, timestamped to the second, tagged by operator. Visualised through NetworkUX’s RAG Polygon tool and published as a public-facing Manchester Coverage Checker anyone can query by postcode.
Coverage is fine. Capacity isn’t.
The MCC report’s top-line conclusion is the one that should worry city centres across the UK most. Signal coverage in Manchester is broadly good — only a handful of areas across the whole borough fall into the “Very Poor” (<−120 dBm) band, and no operator stands out as significantly weaker than another. The problem isn’t whether you can reach a cell. It’s what happens when you do.
Generally good across the MCC area.
All four networks deliver acceptable signal across the bulk of Manchester. The strongest signal coverage is around the city centre, with pockets of strong coverage elsewhere. “Coverage is not a huge issue in the MCC area as a whole.”
Multi-network capacity not-spots throughout.
Once the survey applied threshold filters (upload >1 Mbps, download >3 Mbps, failure rate <5%), capacity not-spots emerged in all four MCC regions. In the city centre, raising the threshold to a top-digital-city-appropriate 5 Mbps revealed many more.
The Threshold Analyser: where multiple networks fail at once.
Operator-by-operator analysis is useful, but for a council the strongest signal is when an area fails on multiple networks at the same time. NetworkUX’s Threshold Analyser colours every cell on the map by how many of the four UK operators pass user-defined thresholds in that location. The result is a single map that prioritises council intervention.
All 4 MNOs passed
3 of 4 passed
2 of 4 passed
1 of 4 passed
None passed
The four MCC quadrants — how the problems are distributed.
The Threshold Analyser identified multi-network capacity not-spots in every MCC region. The numbers below summarise the headline scale of the problem in each.
One important caveat in the report: the survey kits ran on Biffa timetables, which means much of the city-centre data was captured earlier in the day, before peak footfall. A targeted city-centre walking survey at peak shopping times revealed deeper problems — including the Market Street finding below.
Saturday 6 September, 2–6pm. Peak shopping. Look at Vodafone.
To follow up on the city-centre signal seen in the bin-wagon data, Inakalum ran a targeted walking survey along Market Street at peak Saturday shopping time. The four operators delivered four very different user experiences.
“Vodafone customers are getting very poor service in the area during peak times. 99 of 131 upload tests failed (75.6%), which would manifest as a lot of ‘spinning wheels’ on users’ devices.” — MCC Mobile Connectivity Report, December 2025
Where poor signal and poor capacity compound each other.
Didsbury — specifically around Barlow Moor Road and Wilmslow Road — sits in South Manchester, the report’s worst-affected region. The reasons are clear when signal and capacity are looked at together: signal strength is weak in parts of the area (below Ofcom’s −110 dBm recommendation), which forces devices to lower priority and makes them lose out further when the cells get busy.
“The failure rates on upload tests are very high — Inakalum considers anything above 1% to be poor — and these high percentage failure rates across all networks will typically manifest as sluggish performance on devices at best, but more likely that many popular mobile apps and services will only work sporadically.” — MCC Mobile Connectivity Report, December 2025
“The data we received was presented in an easily legible format with ability to tailor and produce reports to support our project aims. Overall, the experience of working with the team at NetworkUX and the product delivered was exceptional in quality and delivery.” — Megan Lawless, Senior Digital Strategy Officer, Manchester City Council
A Coverage Checker for the whole MCC area.
Manchester residents can verify the survey results for their own street. The NetworkUX Manchester Coverage Checker takes a postcode or street name and returns signal strength and data performance maps for all four UK networks, with recommended-network guidance per use case. It’s the most granular coverage checker in the UK — 10-metre hexagons (vs 50–100 m for Ofcom and the operators), all four networks side-by-side, real measurements only.
“I would recommend NetworkUX to any party interested in gathering data on mobile capacity.” — Megan Lawless, Senior Digital Strategy Officer, Manchester City Council
Four takeaways for major UK cities.
Coverage is not the city question any more
In a mature UK city like Manchester, almost everywhere has signal on almost every network. The honest question is whether the data service actually works when residents and visitors need it. That’s a capacity measurement, and operator coverage maps don’t produce it.
Thresholds beat operator-by-operator analysis
The Threshold Analyser is the most useful output for a council because it finds areas where multiple networks fail at once. That’s where residents have no escape route — switching SIM doesn’t help — and that’s where the council’s case for intervention is strongest.
Walking surveys reveal what bin wagons miss
Bin wagons cover every street but on their own schedule — usually outside peak hours. The Market Street walking survey at Saturday peak shopping revealed a Vodafone upload failure rate of 75.6% that the morning bin-wagon survey did not surface. The right answer for any city centre is bin-wagon baseline plus targeted walking surveys at peak times.
4 weeks. Bin-wagon model. Full UK city. Proof of repeatability.
Manchester answers the question every Westminster prospect raised: “Will this scale to my city?” The answer is yes — the same kit, the same method, the same data structure mapped a city of half a million people in four weeks, on the back of one fleet contractor’s normal operations.
Four weeks. Every street. All four networks.
If your authority runs a waste-collection fleet, the Manchester model can scope, run and deliver a borough or city-wide mobile coverage and capacity assessment inside a single month. Talk to us about your area, your operator interests and your timeline.