Quote :-  ” Rural coverage has long been pretty poor: just 69 per cent of rural areas are covered by all four big mobile network providers, according to telecoms regulator Ofcom. But due to a confluence of different factors, the mobile phone blackspots that have long blighted the countryside are starting to hit cities, too. ”

I have told them that years ago and it ain’t getting any better.

Only last week I was told to use wi-fi cos its better except using wi-fi defeats the whole object of having a MOBILE phone

And I thought that only happened in this quaint little country !

In my area, I would be better off with a few carrier pigeons.

My “Providers” are keeping the situation under “Review”, might be better if they actually did something about it, but perhaps that,s too much to ask for.  Just pay up and shut up !

The best I could do was to reduce my TOP-UP from 40 Euro,s to 15 Euro,s per month, since the “service” was/is little more than useless.

When my smart meter was installed the fitter said he had three options. He started with the meter’s internal aerial, next was to add an external one but internal to the house and last resort was to fit an external one wherever needed up on roof if need be. Despite the 2ft thick granite walls the internal one worked. The signal must be better on that side of the house than the living room but it does depend on network.

Just as google traffic uses info from everyone’s phone to plot traffic speed on all roads the mobile companies have millions of phones contacting them every few seconds with a signal report. Therefore they have detailed an accurate maps of the signal in every valley and hill however remote. They can see if there is a temporary outage of a local repeater within seconds. They also monitor the number of people going into and out of a ‘black spot’ to determine the priority of putting in another repeater to fill the gap.

Big brother can’t be bothered but the phone companies can tell when you are having a party as they can see the sudden increase in a number of phones in a small area on a Saturday night. Same applies if you give your mates your wifi password – suddenly lots of Facebook requests your phone is making in the background for ‘news’ are all coming from the same IP address.

On 16 August 2024 at 11:03 Michael Gilligan Said:

This gets discussed from time to time here

… so I think this might be of general interest:

https://apple.news/AzGlREioJTI-ZzzkU3hQILA

MichaelG.

I gave up … kept getting an overlaying screen on that site which I had no way of cancelling without buying something.