Does a lack of mobile coverage push your buttons?

Shareholders will probably tell us that competition is good. 🙁

We already have network sharing for emergency calls, so surely it would help all customers if the same could be done for other calls. The companies could reimburse each other for use of other networks.

It took a while for the railways to agree on a standard gauge for rail track, so don’t expect too much.

Its a pity they chose 4′ 8 1/2″ – Brunel’s 5′ gauge, made a lot of sense for speed and confort. The railways eventually found a way, through a clearing house, of sharing revenue equitably when issuing tickets that covered travel on different companies.

Competition is good – it drives innovation and service, Would you like to go back to the GPO with a 6 month wait for phones, shared lines, operator-connected long distance calls?

By the way, if you have a pension you are almost certainly a shareholder – indirectly; it’s where your income comes from.

Yes, life was simple, but neither efficient nor economical when the GPO ruled the wires [except in Kingston upon Hull which had a more advanced municipal telephone system – and still has an independent system]. When we lived in Enfield Town [now regarded as part of north London] we had to ask the operator to connect us to all numbers, both local and trunk, right up until around 1963 because the telephone instrument had no dial and the exchange was not equipped with a modern mechanical frame. So an amicable battery of well-spoken ladies perched on swivel high-chairs plugged all calls in on a panel. One benefit was their willingness to tell you the time without putting through a charged call to the Speaking Clock; in return they wanted to know what the weather was doing because inside the exchange they could not see out of the windows.

Brunel’s Broad Gauge on the railways [a little before my time] was actually 7’0″ [or 7’0¼” in later years] and in my opinion was far superior to the standardised gauge. If retained, it would have meant that modern carriages would ride much better on the tracks and carry more passengers in more spacious accommodation. But the Great Western Railway’s Broad Gauge had to go, towards the end of the 19th century, because it was an impediment to the long-distance carriage of goods [which had to be transferred between trains at intermediate points]. Luckily though, we have inherited a magnificent legacy in the form of capacious bridges and tunnels which have aided modernisation of the system and, even today, some of the trains running on former Broad Gauge lines are a little wider than standard trains to take advantage of the commodious infrastructure giving passengers a bit more space and comfort..

Back to the topic, it astonishes me that after twenty years of almost universal mobile phone ownership, just a handful of operators, and the investment of tens of billions of pounds, we still have a creaky system that gives patchy coverage, especially in rural areas and that, according to recent posts on another Which? Conversation, EE users have actually suffered a deteriortaion in signal coverage as the former Orange and T Mobile transmitter networks have been
“rationalised”; just as well the company has dropped its previous moniker of “Everything Everywhere”.

Your comment was on the right track and I understood the point. 🙂

I understand the value of competition but where competition leads to unfair treatment of consumers, something needs to be done. Many of our Conversations are prompted by companies treating us unfairly and occasionally acting illegally.

Taking mobile phones as an example, we have examples of companies being unsympathetic to people who cannot even use their phones in their own homes due to lack of a reliable signal. Most of the networks have been pushing up prices of monthly payments for customers during two year contracts, something we are thankfully not accustomed to in the UK. And so on.

Competition is good but it can turn cancerous. Some companies become greedy, some sportsmen cheat, etc.

Yes and fixed price contracts come with a financial penalty when choosing to opt out where unfair practices are evident, which also stifles competition once locked into.