Crap mobile coverage costs UK biz £30m a week, reckons survey

<X> costs biz £<Y>m a week

I see a lot of these reports: sickness, paperwork, internet, facebook, obesity etc. My gut feeling is they cant all be right as the sum would be staggering...

O2 Boost Boxes

O2 do multiple versions of their boost boxes:

- Small. Intended for domestic usage. Max 4 concurrent calls, mobile numbers must be pre-registered.

- Large. Intended for commercial usage. Max 8 concurrent calls, supports PoE. Initially, numbers must be pre-registered, but an email to O2 will get them to switch it to open mode so any O2 mobile can use it.

- Metro. Intended for commercial usage. Max 32 concurrent calls. Only supports PoE and can only be installed by O2. I believe these are open by default.

- I believe they do even larger sizes, but details on those is "by request".

Normally, these boxes don't support hand-off between adjacent boxes. If you get O2 to come out, they'll do a survey and configure the boxes into a mini-network so calls can hand-off between them.

They all support hand-off from boost box to macro network, but not the reverse (Macro network to boost box)

I have no idea about Vodafone, EE or 3 offerings.

Three take the alternative approach of providing an app for the phone which seamlessly hands phone and sms off over a wifi connection instead. So if the office (or house) already have wifi that the phone can use you are sorted, ditto for hotels offering free wifi (and who wants to stay in one that still try to charge through the nose for wifi?).

Orange used to provide something comparable to Suresignal a few years ago, but without a box needing to be supplied (USM?). Worked via wifi, and while call quality could get a bit crunchy, it worked well, needed no config other than Orange specific firmware (on a blackberry in my case) and it was free.

Business, femtocell offerings have been available (in the UK) for a number of years, only not from the major high street operators. Interestingly, I suspect this is an area that BT will exploit once the takeover of EE is approved.

But then given the average office is these days flooded with WiFi there is mileage in letting in-office comm's use the WiFi and be routed differently on exit from the building, but this doesn't play well with those who wish to see wall-to-wall LTE.

ooh

Poorly fitting socks cost UK industry £127.53 million a year.

What Poor Coverage?

Come to Singapore where good in-building mobile coverage is mandated by the Government.

The odd thing is that we can fix this in software - and had already done it - as someone else pointed out - they had UMA - which meant that I could get back to my mobile network provider via another connection, such as that rarely seen thing called Wi-Fi. Of course this was the sort of feature found on proper devices like Blackberries, and since it was straightforward, just worked and required no major ballache, it has been binned.

Because whizz bang "apps" are the order of the day and have been used to replace sanity. Applications that worked just fine are now "apps" and don't work well, have loads of missing functionality and aren't at all smooth.

And now we're papering over those cracks with more silly ideas.

We could instead have just used the technology that was already developed and was doing a damn good job.

£30m - pah, thats nothing compared to the billions in lost productivity in areas with good reception if the number of lazy ****** in my office with their faces stuck in their phone all day is anything to go by.