Locate O2 2G-5G sites using My Network

In late 2025, I was able to find an additional trick with My Network thanks to information shared with me about a year and a half prior & a bit of fiddling. This unfortunately is nowhere near as usual as the original cell ID trick but it still might be handy in certain scenarios.

Essentially, what we discovered was to effectively be able to query cells broadcasting a certain 3G RNC (although that is largely useless now, it’s still useful to tell what sites are doing 3G as some are still up) and a certain 2G BSC. For those unfamiliar with the latter, it is generally the last 3 digits of your 2G LAC, similar to how RNCs typically work. However, like RNCs, it can deviate from the last 3 digits of your 2G LAC which may make it more difficult to search.

To search for these, we type in parent:BSCXXX or parent:RNCXXX into My Network or the coverage checker. Let us use parent:BSC400 as an example, this should query any sites broadcasting 2G in the 21400 LAC zone. You should be greeted with a list of O2 site IDs like this:

Let us use parent:RNC046 as another example to search 3G sites in the 46 RNC zone. We have added a 0 to the beginning since it is not a 3 digit RNC because otherwise it will not search properly. You should be again greeted with a list of O2 site IDs like before, but if you do not find any, it is probably likely that no 3G sites broadcast in that RNC zone anymore.

I hope the information shared here is able to help you with finding more information about O2 deployments. If you need any assistance, our comments section is open or you can contact me through the various socials on the site’s homepage. It would be appreciated if you can share the article to friends if you found this helpful!