Do you lose your cool when you lose signal?

I have a spare phone on a different network when I am out in the country. Lack of mobile broadband signal is even more frustrating.

For years it has been possible to make an emergency call on a mobile even if there is no signal on your own network. This is possible because the call is routed via another network. I would like to see networks shared in this way for non-emergency calls, which would be a great help to the consumer.

Assuming that the chief purpose of using a mobile telephone is to be able to make and receive calls when you’re out and about, having a good signal at home is only half the story. Even having a landline at home does not overcome all the mobile signal outage or deficiency problems because some callers might only have the mobile number on which to contact you. At our previous house we had a poor signal in parts of the house and it got worse the closer we got to the nearby water tower that was bristling with transmitters [I expect there is a plausible scientific explanation for that]. We have subsequently suffered prolonged outages at our new house. Each of us is with a different mobile phone network and we have not given up the landlines, so belt and braces all in place. But when out and about in the car or on the train in East Anglia we often encounter a signal problem at some stage, even in inhabited areas. Looking at the coverage map, it would seem that, cotrary to what you might supose for sparsely populated areas, the Norfolk & Suffolk Broads have much better signal coverage than the rest of those counties!

I agree with Wavechange on transferability of connection. All significant settlements seem to have multiple network coverage, the remainder of the countryside has almost nothing so there needs to be a way of making sure there is some form of overlap and alternative signal route to fill in the empty spaces on the coverage map. There is one very large tract of countryside near us that is practically devoid of all coverage yet it contains several villages each with just one little transmitter covering a tiny spot and many villages with nothing at all.

Being on PAYG I haven’t looked into this, but I should be interested to know whether there is a cooling-off period after signing a mobile phone contract such that if you find when you get home that there is no signal or a very weak one on that network you can cancel the contract. The interactive coverage map just published by Which? should help a lot and it ought to be a network licence condition that any customer in a mobile phone shop has the right to view it Looking at it on-line before even entering a shop would make network selection less fraught, but other factors might still affect the decision – like tariff preference, commonality of network between callers, and previous network experience [especially in the light of the fixed-price-contracts price hike fiasco].

Bundles should be banned. Networks should be forced to charge only on a consumption basis (e.g. 1p/MB, 2p/text etc), either on a postpaid or prepaid basis, so that they receive revenue only when and where they actually provide the service. Three UK already does this on prepaid and such consumption-only charging is common in some other countries.

Bundles serve only to charge consumers for usage that they don’t use, because most bundles are not fully utilised. If you go over the allowance of your monthly bundle, you are often charged at a much higher rate than pro-rata. Even without bundles, networks could still give volume discounts but would be prevented for charging for usage that wasn’t used. Imagine if we had to buy energy in bundles; it would be absurd, so why do we tolerate it with mobile phones?