To be sick of the piss poor phone signal across UK

[itwasnevermine]

I'm sick of it.

I'm in a place I've been to a million and one times. It's usually got amazing signal but this time I can barely get 3G! I was down in Cornwall the other month and despite having full 5G it wouldn't even send a text!

It's shocking, what am I even paying for with my phone contract at this point

I bet he doesn't pay Vodafone £53 a month for his trouble either. I have 2 5G masts literally within 2 miles of my workplace yet since they built a new part of the hospital I can't get a signal.. I cant even receive friends' texts at work. I shit you not.

The NHS free WiFi service is an actual joke too.

Yet some colleagues have no issues and are on their phones all the time.

@HundredMilesAnHour it actually depends on your broadband connection and that is pretty reliable for most people.

I'm from one of those places you mentioned, there are huge parts of the city where there is zero signal!
Went to Cornwall in August, had nothing most of the time. I got so lost as maps wasn't loading!

I’m on o2 and found Cornwall ok this summer but I appreciate it’s a big county, maybe I was at the other end. I also didn’t realise until this thread that the more people,connected to the local 4g mast the slower it might be. So my little village might get worse with all the hundreds and hundreds of homes they keep building.

There's very little 5G in Cornwall, 3G is being turned off and 4G often has low capacity. Tis shit.

I can’t complain. We are remote and there is no phone signal. 4G is fine though so we can still make and receive calls.

Even in cities, there are places where the mobile signal is awful. There's no signal in our nearby city's bus station for example. You have to leave the station and walk up the road to get a signal. Same in the city where my son lives - he lives on the edge of town and there's no signal at "ground level" - he's on the third floor so gets a signal, but he can't when he's just stood outside or in the car park, nor his walk to the bus stop. He has a regular train ride across country from one city to another and there's no signal for roughly three quarters of the journey. We really a third world country when it comes to mobile signal!

It's awful where I live. I had an important call yesterday, so I hung out the window to get the call, which usually works. It cut off 3 times so it's just got worse here. I'm on o2, my husband is 3 network and he can't get any reception at all. Yes we are very slightly rural but we are also 15 minutes away from two major motorways.

The city near me (we're SW) that I visit regularly... has no mobile data or call connection in huge parts of it. Literally you can't get any reception at all.
It really is appalling.
I know Spain very well and I have been in the middle of nowhere up in the Picos mountains or the sparsely populated central areas and I have never ever not been able to get signal.

Which is also dependent on your power supply and that isn't always reliable, nor is broadband. I write this from experience having recently had no power for 3 days therefore no broadband and no 'landline'. I was just one property affected out of at least 150.

I know Spain very well and I have been in the middle of nowhere up in the Picos mountains or the sparsely populated central areas and I have never ever not been able to get signal.

When roaming abroad your phone will usually connect to the best available signal regardless of network. At home you are locked to one network. It may not be the best in the area you are in.

We have backup power for essentials. Fridges, freezers, central heating, internet and lights.

I wonder how long (if at all) the back-up power would last at the fibre cabinet / exchange, though

That doesn't help when the power to the masts is interrupted. We suffered it during Storm Desmond when our city lost it;s electric for a few days. The mobile mast batteries ran out pretty quickly meaning no mobile signal. That was on top of the BT telephone exchange failing too, so we had no telephony at all for around 3 days, not the old pulse landline, not broadband, and not mobile either.

Power demand at the cab is very low, so batteries will provide many hours of backup, main exchanges have v large batteries but there is huge demand with so many other ISPs kit in exchanges now, not just openreach kit..

The big problem is life line monitors the frail use, wont work on fibre, with loss of power and why should the customer have a large UPS back up in their house which they have to pay to keep charged up? and who will test them? their batteries don't last forever and when they fail, will alarm, which could be 1 in the morning, who will maintain that in 5 or 10 years time??

My partners belief is copper is being ripped out because of man power reasons and the scrap cost of copper, estimates are that there is £ billions of the stuff in the ground/over head to be recovered....

o2 is shocking in some places, and won't work inside certain buildings

That is the problem. If the power to the village goes, so does the power to the local mast. Mitigated to some extent by the fact that we can get a signal from an alternate mast further away if our local mast goes down.

I agree. Mine is dreadful in the SE. I can't get signal in my house or in my office. It drives me crazy.

Good redundancy policy would have the mast fed from a different substation/transformer to the village and different for the local cab/exchange too.

But since deregulation, all of this went out the window, my other half used to have to adhere to strict power alternatives but thats long gone.

@thethingsiusedtodo the "copper is being ripped out" because the old landline network is on its last legs and becoming unrepairable.

We are at risk of an unrecoverable failure of some parts of the old landline network.

All comms networks need power, it isn't magic. It is just the old landline system was powered from the exchange.

We're 02 in a town. Reception has been ruined since two neighbours built extensions.

That argument could have made many years ago & i'm certainly not saying it shouldn't happen, we ve got FTPP here with a voip landline, brilliant service from BT.

Fibre is hardly new tech, been in the telecoms backbone for years.

Whats changed is an aging workforce, few taken on to learn about the older residential tech and the realisation all that copper is worth an awful lot of money!

Businesses were moved from copper lines decades ago, first 2mg digital carriers and more recently SIP trunking.

But how to get around power requirements for more frail people still hasn't been resolved, a small power UPS wont power a router and modem for more than an hour or two.

All of which is why most european countries have a more realistic 2030 date for copper phase out.

I’m on GiffGaff and signal is great where I live (Midlands) but when we visit PIL down south it’s shocking. I’d have to change provider if we moved there.