Reliability and coverage - not speed
Having speed is fine, but it means nothing without reliability or coverage to match.
When travelling on the trains, you have to pre-plan what you are doing before getting to certain places on the trip - both for voice and data services. 4G is nice one minute, then 3G, Edge and then nothing...
App vendors need to better consider the unreliability of coverage in their apps. Why for example can't the Youtube app download locally so that I can watch later, rather than having to be on-line all the time ??
Why does Spotify decide that if I open the app after 30 days of not using it on that device and I happen to be in a not-spot at that point, then it drops ALL the locally cached music. Why not keep the cached content and just not let me access it, its the same effect at that point, but far easier to recover once I'm connected again as I don't have to waste loads of my monthly quota re-obtaining what I already had.
The other concern is that it appears that the mobile networks take bandwidth from yesterdays technology to make space for the new ones - this is nice in principle, up to the point where it makes an existing device that is on-contract go slower or less reliable than it did when you brought it. Presumably this is done to simplify things for the network provider and to try and force people up to newer devices.
Backwards compatibility matters more in my book than the latest whizz bang technology that nobody has yet since its price loaded by the manufacturers. I'll generally only buy it when its at sensible prices, so if you want earlier adoption and customers to move over faster, then don't price load the technology. We've already been paying monthly charges for a service, so fund it from that instead.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
