O2 Seeks to Rediscover Its Network Mojo

Last week at MWC 2026, Virgin Media O2 unveiled its latest Mobile Transformation Plan, which will see the company invest £700 million into its mobile network in 2026. This mirrors a similar commitment it made in 2025.

In Barcelona, I sat down with Robert Joyce, director of mobile access engineering at Virgin Media O2, to talk through the details.

Mr Joyce was candid about some of the recent challenges faced by the O2 network. It has consistently ranked below its rivals in third-party tests, burdened by an inferior spectrum position and the weight of supporting 46 million connections. As well as its own retail customers, Virgin Media O2 hosts the UK’s two largest mobile virtual network operators, Tesco Mobile and Sky Mobile, and has seen traffic double in the past five years.

But, after years of losing ground, the network may finally be heading in the right direction. Our conversation had an upbeat tone that has been missing from O2 in recent times.

A big reason for this positivity is that it secured 78.8 MHz of spectrum from Vodafone in a £343 million deal last year, part of a concession from the latter’s merger with Three. This much-needed boost took Virgin Media O2’s share of UK licensed spectrum to approximately 30%. Mr Joyce said the company immediately switched on the new 2.6 GHz frequencies, which will soon be joined by the 1.4 GHz frequencies. The remaining spectrum, at 2.1 GHz and 3.4 GHz, will follow.

Virgin Media O2 has also nearly completed the switch-off of its 3G network, the last UK operator to do so. It’s reallocating this 900 MHz spectrum to 5G that supports wide-area coverage because of its low-band characteristics.

This has helped the company claim the broadest 5G standalone network in the UK, with 87% population coverage, up from 70% in September. The 5G standalone service — which is positioned to customers as 5G+ — also makes use of 700 MHz, 2.6 GHz and 3.6 GHz spectrum.

The coverage improvements reflect a back-to-basics approach that strives to offer a reliable service everywhere, rather than competing with rivals on speed. Mr Joyce pointed out that most customers aren’t looking for gigabits per second, they just want a consistently good experience on popular apps like WhatsApp, TikTok and YouTube.

One of the most eye-catching parts of the new plan is the roll-out of 1,000 “giga sites”, which use Nokia’s dual-band, massive MIMO technology to combine low-, mid- and high-band frequencies to improve capacity. The initial focus is urban areas, with the first sites going live in locations including London and Middlesbrough. Mr Joyce explained that the giga sites will support far greater efficiency. He said that last year’s £700 million investment added 1 Tbps of capacity to the network, but this year the same amount of spending will deliver 2 Tbps.

Virgin Media O2 has long sought to improve capacity by deploying small cells, partly to compensate for its restrained spectrum position. It counts over 2,000 cells in its portfolio, spanning dense urban and rural locations, and using partnerships with Ontix, Freshwave, Cellnex, Boldyn Networks and others.

Small cells remain an important part of the new plan, alongside what Mr Joyce called “mini macros” — rooftop deployments in urban areas using 2.6 GHz and 3.5 GHz frequencies for extra capacity. Trials will take place this year.

Another important focus is improving coverage along railways and major roads. This aligns with our recent UK consumer research, where four in 10 people identified “a better service on major transport routes” as a top three improvement they’d like their mobile provider to make.

Mr Joyce gave examples of a neutral-host partnership with Cellnex to boost coverage on the London to Brighton railway line, and its participation in the government-backed Project Reach, which is addressing mobile performance in tunnels and at stations.

Virgin Media O2 has also undertaken major upgrades at sports stadiums. This includes a bespoke 5G distributed antenna system at the Allianz Stadium in Twickenham, offering 34 dedicated zones.

Additionally, the company is harnessing its own fibre network for mobile backhaul; to date, it has connected 2,000 mobile sites to boost capacity and improve reliability.

The operator’s big news recently was the launch of O2 Satellite in partnership with SpaceX Starlink, the UK’s first direct-to-device service and one of the first in Europe. This aligns with the reliability theme, immediately boosting its land-mass coverage from 89% to 95%. This is equivalent to adding an area the size of Greater Tokyo, although it’s currently only available to customers with a Samsung Galaxy S25 series device.

Mr Joyce noted that Starlink has the biggest direct-to-device constellation, with 650 satellites, and that the service uses 5 MHz of its 1800 MHz spectrum. Rival VodafoneThree hopes to follow suit with a satellite service in partnership with AST SpaceMobile later this year but, until then, O2 can position itself as offering the UK’s only satellite service.

The O2 network remains on the back foot, but there are promising signs of progress. It was recently named as Europe’s most-improved mobile network by Umlaut and the company will be hoping that its latest investment plan enables it to narrow the gap on its rivals.