Three to pleasure bumpkins with 800MHz

Re: as somebody who has just returned to three....

Always a "YMMV" issue. I have Voda, EE, O2 and 3 (business reasons) and out in rural (but not exactly wilderness) TF9 only O2 has a stable 3G connection.

3 just won't work, Voda fluctuates alarmingly from 4 bar 3G to nothing several times a minute and EE mostly manages bad 2G at best. Wired broadband is around 7Mbps.

Fifteen minutes drive home to urban suburbs and I have 18Mbs EE 4G and 1.6Mbps (that is NOT a typo) wired BT. (in both areas OpenReach is the only game in town unless I lease a private PtP microwave link).

All the SIMs get used at one customer site or another (re-routed with an 08453 number). Personally I can't see any likelihood of a unified solution other than merging all networks into one with a covenant that all base stations be retained. Which is re-inventing the GPO of course ;)

Re: Not so good if you've got a OnePlus One

Well, booga. I just renewed the family contracts with Vodafone. If 3 did this 3 weeks ago they may have had 3 new customers.

I just refurbished the "family fleet" with end-of-line fire sales Xperia SPs which all happen to have a band 20 LTE radio.

Re: Not so good if you've got a OnePlus One

As always, xda-developers is your friend. http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2794544&nocache=1

Re: The FT this week called the O2/Three merger a solution looking for a problem"

It's just grumping without any serious analysis.

Relevant bit is -

"The European regulators appear strangely in thrall to the operators’ argument that they need to merge in order to invest in new networks and services. But there is no evidence that this is so. Although returns on capital employed have fallen in European mobile from a very high 20 per cent to 10 per cent over the past five years, this still well exceeds their cost of capital.

Nor have regulators found a satisfactory substitute for the competitive stimulus they are permitting operators to eliminate. Guaranteeing access to virtual mobile operators is little more than a sticking plaster with few adhesive qualities. These entities neither reliably lead the market on price, nor can they deliver improvements to the quality of networks.

Brussels’ past lack of rigour gives little comfort that it will reach a much firmer conclusion in the case of Hutchison’s British deal. Indeed the risk is that precedent will lead the European regulator to rubber-stamp the same flawed arrangements.

The mobile business remains a national market and those affected are UK consumers. Either Brussels must toughen its line, even at the cost of some inconsistency, or it should break the circuit of dismal precedent and hand the deal back to the UK authorities. One thing is certain. Having messed up three mobile markets, Brussels should not be permitted to make the same mistake again."