Government and mobile networks plan to drive out not-spots

Perhaps the UK has got it right by giving low priority to coverage on the Tube. Public transport may be better than cars but it uses natural resources and causes other environmental damage. We should look forward to more people living within walking and cycling range of where they work.

Talking to people on journeys is a way of relaxing and offsetting the stress of the hectic lifestyle that has become more common in the past few decades.

Though searching in vain for signal can be frustrating, being out of communication is sometimes a good way of decreasing stress.

Wavechange – I would agree totally with your comment about people travelling too far from home to work if you had made it with regard to mainline trains, but not with regard to the Tube. Londoners use the Tube for relatively short distances, and there just isn’t space for homes in London’s workplace centres, most notably the City, which has around 7,000 residents but around 300,000 workers. When working in Canary Wharf, I can walk to work in 15-20 minutes, but working in the City means a DLR journey, the last part of which goes underground without coverage and even without wifi in the DLR part of Bank station.

NFH – We are both wanting better coverage but sometimes I wonder if society is focusing to much on technological achievements, or doing things simply because we can do them. I remember learning to program in BASIC in the early 80s, at a time when a significant part of the population was doing the same. At the time, most home computers were not particularly useful for anyone other than the enthusiast.

I confess to having spent hundreds of hours playing with phones on different networks, swapping SIM cards and putting wireless dongles on window ledges and the parapets of bridges in the hope of using wireless broadband. While in signal-chasing mode, I sometimes reflect on the fact that we have an obsession with communication and travel.

What I feel most strongly about is people using mobile phones when driving. I’ve had to do four emergency stops at one roundabout because of people not concentrating while using hands-free phones in their cars.

The problem is not the lack of availability of dual SIM phones in the UK but that mainstream popular phones such as the iPhone are not available in dual SIM versions anywhere in the world. We might eventually move away from physical SIM cards and instead use a simple login. For example, why shouldn’t you be able to sign into your mobile phone account on your phone in the same way that you sign into your Skype account? Skype doesn’t need a SIM card to identify you to the service, so why should a mobile network?

I certainly agree about that. I’m paying for 5GB data a month and most of the places I want to use it there is not an adequate 3G signal indoors, never mind 4G.

Agree , I use Three’s PAYG and its very good value for my usage pattern with credit not expiring after 30 days, even got 4G in Bham the other day.

Credit does not expire after 30 days on any UK network. On nearly all UK networks (including virtual networks), credit expires 6 months after the last change in credit balance. The most notable exceptions are Lycamobile (3 months) and White Mobile (2 months).

Credit expiring 30 days after the last top-up is common only in countries like France, not the UK.

It’s several years ago but a PAYG phone I kept in the car for emergency stopped working. I phoned Vodafone and they said that they suspended phones that had not been used for 30 days. It was activated without problem. After that, I put a different phone in the car, after establishing that it would not be cut off after 30 days. In fact, the credit on that phone had been purchased from One2One, before T-Mobile took over. It had belonged to my late mother. At one time I had a SIM on every network when on holiday in the country to maximise my chance of making a phone call. How sad is that?

In the old days, you could only get mobile phone service on contract. There was no PAYG, not even SIM-only contracts. When the networks first introduced PAYG, credit expired unless you topped up periodically. In France they still follow this policy which unnecessarily increases customer churn, but UK networks haven’t done this for at least 10 years.

Perhaps there should be statutory internet-free days to encourage such activity as yours. Maybe it would help the health of the population?

I can recommend TV-free days.

A landline might be a better investment than one of these devices.