MP launches ten minute rule bill on in-UK roaming

@AC

Given the relative densities you would think it would be easy to get 100% coverage but the remaining population live on scattered islands, in national parks or just in rural areas. These make it very difficult to even place base stations, never mind make them cost effective. Especially as BT as incumbent telco is mandated to provide a voice telephone line to anywhere in the country. No matter how they have to do it. There were cases where a few new houses were built in rural areas and the cost of running lines to them was so great that BT just built a new exchange for them and fibred it into the network!

Tunnels

I think Greg Clark may have failed to notice that being on a train around Tunbridge Wells involves a fair amount of travelling in tunnels, hence the 5 dead spots on a 16 minute ride.

I also suspect that the amount of roaming needed to keep everyone connected would lead to an astonishing load on the HLRs as the register/de-register events occurred, this is manageable with a low percentage of roaming users when they don't change network very often but with everyone flitting from network to network it would soon become very difficult to manage.

As you say, sharing of infrastructure in less well covered spots may well put paid to this idea.

Gets a thumbs down from me anyway.

@Tom Kelsall

"Who cares if 99.999999% of the UK population is covered, if when I'm stuck on top of a foggy mountain in Wales, I can't call my Mom and tell her I'll be late for tea?"

Or more pertinently, why can't you call the emergency services from halfway down said foggy mountain so you don't end up just late!

About time too

The fact is that, for any given network operator, large areas of the island of Britain are simply inaccessible. It's vey annoying to find that when you go for a walk, cycle ride or week-end away in the country there's a good chance that you'll be inaccessible. In fact I've considered getting a foreign SIM for this reason. Three cheers say I !

Correction.... but still a bad idea.

If his problem on the Tunbridge Wells train ride was network capacity, then roaming to another operator probably WOULD resolve the issue; but he'd have to disconnect and re-register, which would be "a lot of annoying bother".

Certainly, the load on the HLRs and also SDCCH (from memory - the GSM RF channel used for such signalling) from people registering on whichever service is stronger as they come out of the tube/tunnel/mountain pass, and then re-registering on their own network seconds later, would be huge; particularly in dense areas like London, and this proposal is impractical because of it. Also, imagine how many people would happily launch into a call "without realising [they] were roaming", and then complain about their huge bill afterwards. Lots.

You can also make emergency calls on any network already, regardless of subscription, so not a valid argument either.

Still, it's nice to see an MP with the public's interests at heart, for a change.

This Dude, because he also looks like a nice man.

Noooooo

I'm happy living in my mobe-coverage-blackspot as work can't call me on any of Orange, O2 or Vod (I have 3 phones) - I don't wanna roam onto T-Mo and then be contactable!!!

3 dead spots London to Cambridge

The operators have optimised their network to the Ofcom testing methods. As a result roads are covered better than railways and abissmal indoor coverage is a norm. I am not surprised that he hit a few dead spots into London. I travel on one of the main commuter lines on a casual basis and there are several clearly defined holes in the coverage (different for different ops, but none covers the whole journey).

@Damian Skeeles

"You can also make emergency calls on any network already, regardless of subscription, so not a valid argument either"

Not true, even if your mobile says it can (probably a Sony Ericsson)

It is dangerous to rely on this feature as it is not supported in the UK, I suspect due to the number of crank/anonymous calls that would be generated if it was allowed.

Coverage

Dead spots in coverage around Tunbridge Wells? That'll be NIMBYism preventing the networks from putting up masts. I mean, why would any network voluntarily loose a valuable customer who could be making or receiving calls on the train (and people who live in Tunbridge Wells and commute into London do tend to be nice valuable customers).

Poor coverage on a train? That'll be the effect of sitting inside a metal box and moving quickly - the train carriage makes a fairly good Faraday cage as it is (and Virgin trains with their metallised windows are even better at absorbing the weak mobile signal) but then to make life even harder for the network to handle, combine your mobile with a hundred or so others on the train and then start moving quickly so that the network has to handle a lot of simultaneous cell handovers.

Population vs geographic coverage? That'll be the need to earn some return on the huge sums invested in network infrastructure. And that return comes from customers paying for services; if there is only one man and his dog living / working in the several square miles covered by a cell, that's a lot of profit that the network needs to earn from the dog ('cos the man is presumably smart enough to switch to another network with lower prices...)

Intra-national roaming does already exist in the UK - there's a commercial agreement between Orange and Hutchison 3G to provide national roaming onto GSM for '3' customers. Didn't need regulatory or governmental intervention, its a commercial deal which replaced the previous deal that Hutch signed with O2. If there was a real commercial driver for this (ie a network would be able to win customers by improving the quality of its network) then it would have happened by now. A lot of effort went into trying to make infrastructure-sharing work because of the clear cost benefit of NOT doubling up on those expensive cell sites.

Thumbs down, because things never work well that are forced on an industry by the grandstanding of otherwise faceless backbenchers who can't resist a bit of grandstanding.

@AC

Telstra only claims 98% coverage because about 98% of the population resides in only a handful of locations. Australian population density is very urban. It's also a lie as there are plenty of black-spots in these areas. But you're right in that they charge like nothing I've ever witnessed.

Still, cant beat fending off foreign competition to protect the Government owned (in part) incumbent can you?

But then again ......

... if the actual network itself were divorced from the operator Railtrack stylee we could have a physical infrastructure that covered 100% of the UK. The traditional operators (O2 etc) would then sell the airtime and handsets, but the Network operator would only be responsible for ensuring coverage and availability. We did it with the rails, we did a fair bit of it with the old BT, so we certainly could do it to the public's benefit with the mobile operators. The competition could then be between what services each operator supplies rather than network coverage which we pretty much all agree can suck at often.

Where's the Two Thumbs icon?

NIMBYs

I believe Mr Clark's dead spots may well well originate in the obscure fact that oddest of creatures, the NIMBY, was in fact created by a mad professor in Tunbridge Wells who was unhappy that too few of his neighbours wrote "Disgusted of" letters to the Times any longer. Before settling on the correct specs, a few of his early (and overly zealous in their apoplectic fuming) experimental versions escaped into the wild, where they bred prodigiously. The entire town is now a hotbed of suspicion of anything 'newfangled' that wasn't common in Victorian England, and the lynching of strangers in front of the Town Hall is a well-loved local tradition.

Interestingly, the town was described as "a graveyard with lights" by a well known 1980s soap actor, incarcerated there for the duration of an Xmas pantomime run.

Mines the well tailored number with the buttons at the back...

Rip-off charges

The EU cap doesn't apply in-country, so operators would be free to charge whatever extortionate rates they felt like - as they already do for international calls.

Example: I've a UK SIM and a German SIM. If I'm in Germany and need to call the UK it's actually cheaper to do it with the roaming UK SIM, as that's price-capped to 30p/min or whatever, whereas the German operator charges nearly EUR2/min for overseas calls. That's FIVE times as expensive.

It's the same in reverse in the UK - I'm better off calling Germany using a German SIM. Bizarre...

Who really cares?

Personally, I'd rather some MP introduced a Bill to prevent any network coverage in places like concert halls, cinemas, restaurants, buses, and so on. Or for an enterprising company to develop a paint that blocks the signals. There's nothing worse than having a Sharon or Tracy sit beside you on public transport or in a cinema and be forced to listen to her weeks sexual achievements with Darren and what she bought at Top Shop on Saturday.

Don't rely on it.

"You can also make emergency calls on any network already, regardless of subscription, so not a valid argument either"

Don't rely on it!

In the UK it is not possible to call emergency services unless you have a working SIM and coverage on your own network, there is no home-country roaming not even for emergency calls. So if you are for example a T-Mobile customer and there is no T-Mobile coverage, but there is Orange and O2 coverage you will still not be able to made emergency calls.

The GSM spec allows it, however it's not used in the UK.

Your mobile phone might say SOS Calls Only or Emergency Calls Only - however that is a default message on some phone when not in signal because they probably think most people will be in a country that allows emergency calls to be made on other networks when they don't have coverage on their own.

Sadly many people think they can make such calls - please ensure you let as many people know it is not the case as you wouldn't want someone to rely on it and then come unstuck.