Vodafone customers in Glasgow have hit out at the network operator for offering poor mobile broadband coverage for at least the last six months.

A thread has been opened on the carrier's official support forum on the matter, with the discussion attracting more than 2,200 views and 165 replies.

Will Finlay, a Vodafone subscriber who lives in the Scottish city, told the Register that the problem of patchy or non-existent 3G signals appeared to resolve itself for a period recently, before returning one or two weeks after.

This could be down to the tens of thousands of students who returned to Glasgow for the start of the university year, putting greater strain on Vodafone's mobile broadband infrastructure in the city, Mr Finlay claimed.

Having had some experience of mobile networks in his time working for one of Vodafone's rivals, he expressed his belief that the company needs to invest in its infrastructure in Glasgow in order to meet demand for mobile data usage.

Responding to the hordes of complaints, Vodafone issued a statement revealing it is aware of the 3G problems affecting the city, but insisted they are not being caused by the high volume of customers attempting to use its mobile broadband services.

"These aren't related to capacity bottlenecks or a lack of investment in the area but to some software quality issues, coupled with the need to attain planning permission to install additional sites," the carrier explained.

"We're investigating some issues connected more specifically to certain sites in the centre of Glasgow. It's our priority to sort this out and we hope to see further improvements very soon."

As well as struggling with Vodafone mobile broadband access, Glasgow also has one of the lowest overall levels of broadband take-up in the UK.

According to Ofcom, just 50 per cent of people in Greater Glasgow have a broadband connection, compared with 61 per cent across the whole of Scotland and 74 per cent throughout the UK.

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06th November 2011

I have been useing mine for the past 4 month as i am an ex-glasgow man and live down south,this problem is all over it's not just a Glasgow problem honestly the dongle gives you £15 for 2 Gig and there are only 3 main sites i use FACEBOOK,DAILY RECORD,GOOGLE+ because if you go to a high content site like YOU-TUBE it just takes all your 2 gig very quickly,it is a very sad piece of work as on the 3 network they give you 15 gig a month,i am in the process of paying my phone bill off with B-T and cant wait for my proper BROADBAND. total rip off as these were tested in china where they put a sattalite up 9 years ago to download a film in about 2 minites,so when they have been shipped to the U.K whole different story not worth it as i would not let anyone i know buy this piece of work it's bang out of order.