Mobile phones

[flick]

So, mobile phones don't work so well in The Countryside.

With ee, you can reliably make a phone call if you stand outside the front door. You can often get text messages, and occasionally a bit of Edge, if you leave your phone in a room at the front of the house, but if you try to reply then your signal mysteriously vanishes while you're typing, and then you have to go outside to send it.

With O2, you can get good voice reception if you walk all the way up to the top of the paddock, and you might even get a little data.

With Vodafone, you have no chance at all.

So, we've switched our phones from Giffgaff (O2) to Virgin (ee).

And wow but Virgin is crap. Even when we go to The Big City (er, Canterbury), it's not unusual to have no signal and even when there's full bars of 3G you can't load a webpage half the time. Sigh.

Comments

[nils.livejournal.com]

Lack of reception in the sticks is hardly surprising, but Canterbury? I seem to get good reception (both signal and data) in Ashford (on EE/T-Mobile)

[elvum.livejournal.com]

We went down the femtocell route, which gives us perfect coverage throughout the house, albeit without helping significantly elsewhere in the local area...

[flickgc.livejournal.com]

In the house, it's not really too much of a problem. And I'm not sure that we actually have enough internet to get a femtocell....

[http://users.livejournal.com/_nicolai_/]

(re: femtocell)

These maybe useful:
http://shop.vodafone.co.uk/shop/mobile-accessories/sure-signal (any phone)
http://help.ee.co.uk/system/selfservice.controller?CONFIGURATION=1016&PARTITION_ID=1&secureFlag=false&segment=consumer&TIMEZONE_OFFSET=&CMD=VIEW_ARTICLE&ARTICLE_ID=1187592&CUSTOM_BRAND=Orange (some phones)
http://www.o2.co.uk/static/www/docs/business/boostbox_qsg_guide_standard_v4_lr.pdf (any phone)

[maeve-the-red.livejournal.com]

Has Dr Plokta not organised for his own personal satellite to take up geostationary orbit above the new abode? Very remiss of him...