4 ms·

Personally, I'm just hoping that 3G will eventually make it to England. That seems more realistic, though I don't doubt that the Bay Area will be happily baski

Personally, I'm just hoping that 3G will eventually make it to England. That seems more realistic, though I don't doubt that the Bay Area will be happily basking in this 5G niceness by the time it happens. I just got back from 3 months in Southeast Asia, and it's just baffling to me how I could get fast data to my phone in virtually unlimited quantities, out in the sticks of rural Cambodia, for five dollars. But coming back to England, my town of 25,000 people has neither working DSL nor cellular data. I keep a 3G router in the desk drawer to battle the bi-weekly half-day outages that BT routinely delivers, but that also will happily drop down to 300 baud if anybody else in town decides to use the internet at the same time. It is certainly solvable. But the monopoly internet supplier doesn't seem to have it as a priority to supply internet.

sgt101 11y ago
Curious - which town are you in? I have 4g and 200mbs-1 fttp and I live in a field in the middle of suffolk.
- jasonkester 11y ago
  The North. Kendal, specifically. One day Virgin will route a cable our way, and life will be good. Until then we're stuck with BT and their 200 year old copper (and a few cell towers without enough power to drill through the stone buildings in town, let alone the little hills around it).
  - buro9 11y ago
    Maybe Kendal should come together and investigate building your own http://b4rn.org.uk/ http://b4rn.org.uk/ Actually you're right on the edge of the coverage area, why not contact them and see what it would take to extend it.
  - jamesbrownuhh 11y ago
    No 3G, as you say, but Ofcom's mobile coverage checker shows Kendal bathed in 4G EE coverage, with a good chance of good indoor reception. (And if not, a 4G router with decent outdoor antenna should help enormously.) Or there's always satellite...?
- nextos 11y ago
  Even in some parts of Cambridge 3/4G leaves a lot to be desired. EE has sometimes downtimes that can be measured in days. Its very disappointing. Its also absurd companies offering "unlimited" mobile traffic do deep packet inspection. Whenever I try to SSH to any of my servers I get banned immediately, despite having a ridiculously low data rate.
  - ccozan 11y ago
    I never heard about been banned ( what does it mean, get punished for 10 mins with no network ?? ) for using SSH. Maybe is something else? Indeed, ToS requests that you don't use the data connection for something like VoIP or other type of communication, in practice they don't care. I have in Germany's Vodafone 3GBs that I can spend over LTE, and boy, they are spent religiosly until the last KB. Half free communications to outside Germany, half is streaming music/videos.
    - nextos 11y ago
      UK telecoms are a bit peculiar. E.g., Giffgaff bans users for 30 mins (first warning). This is pretty well known. They try to avoid tethering through SSH tunnels.
- the_mitsuhiko 11y ago
  There are people in London who are living in an edge only area and the closest they get to fiber is docsis over a few hundred meters.
MrBuddyCasino 11y ago
The cellular coverage in Southeast Asia was surprising for me as well. I'd like to know the economics behind this, I guess the main considerations are: - energy consumption - rent for antennas on other people's houses - data backhaul - population density Still not sure how that explains the differences.
- the_mitsuhiko 11y ago
  Cell coverage makes absolutely no sense to me. Austria and Switzerland have amazing mobile coverage but at the same time few people living there yet there is 4G everywhere. Might sound like those are small countries, but they are also really spread out and hard to provide service for (lots of mountains). Yet the UK for instance has abysmal mobile coverage even in the densest populated areas. I can only assume that the general environment is different (regulatory, government subsidies etc.).
the_mitsuhiko 11y ago
> I'm just hoping that 3G will eventually make it to England. 3G is a useless technology and absolutely pointless in perusing at this point. It's cheaper and better to just go with LTE and there is a bit of room for upgrading in that stack.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
Shivetya 11y ago
It isn't just England. Even in many areas of the states getting a good cell connection can be frustrating. Half the time if I need data while on the road I will end up at a McD just to get a good connection.

sgt101 11y ago

Curious - which town are you in? I have 4g and 200mbs-1 fttp and I live in a field in the middle of suffolk.

jasonkester 11y ago
The North. Kendal, specifically. One day Virgin will route a cable our way, and life will be good. Until then we're stuck with BT and their 200 year old copper (and a few cell towers without enough power to drill through the stone buildings in town, let alone the little hills around it).
- buro9 11y ago
  Maybe Kendal should come together and investigate building your own http://b4rn.org.uk/ http://b4rn.org.uk/ Actually you're right on the edge of the coverage area, why not contact them and see what it would take to extend it.
- jamesbrownuhh 11y ago
  No 3G, as you say, but Ofcom's mobile coverage checker shows Kendal bathed in 4G EE coverage, with a good chance of good indoor reception. (And if not, a 4G router with decent outdoor antenna should help enormously.) Or there's always satellite...?
nextos 11y ago
Even in some parts of Cambridge 3/4G leaves a lot to be desired. EE has sometimes downtimes that can be measured in days. Its very disappointing. Its also absurd companies offering "unlimited" mobile traffic do deep packet inspection. Whenever I try to SSH to any of my servers I get banned immediately, despite having a ridiculously low data rate.
- ccozan 11y ago
  I never heard about been banned ( what does it mean, get punished for 10 mins with no network ?? ) for using SSH. Maybe is something else? Indeed, ToS requests that you don't use the data connection for something like VoIP or other type of communication, in practice they don't care. I have in Germany's Vodafone 3GBs that I can spend over LTE, and boy, they are spent religiosly until the last KB. Half free communications to outside Germany, half is streaming music/videos.
  - nextos 11y ago
    UK telecoms are a bit peculiar. E.g., Giffgaff bans users for 30 mins (first warning). This is pretty well known. They try to avoid tethering through SSH tunnels.
the_mitsuhiko 11y ago
There are people in London who are living in an edge only area and the closest they get to fiber is docsis over a few hundred meters.

MrBuddyCasino 11y ago

The cellular coverage in Southeast Asia was surprising for me as well. I'd like to know the economics behind this, I guess the main considerations are: - energy consumption - rent for antennas on other people's houses - data backhaul - population density Still not sure how that explains the differences.

the_mitsuhiko 11y ago
Cell coverage makes absolutely no sense to me. Austria and Switzerland have amazing mobile coverage but at the same time few people living there yet there is 4G everywhere. Might sound like those are small countries, but they are also really spread out and hard to provide service for (lots of mountains). Yet the UK for instance has abysmal mobile coverage even in the densest populated areas. I can only assume that the general environment is different (regulatory, government subsidies etc.).

the_mitsuhiko 11y ago

> I'm just hoping that 3G will eventually make it to England. 3G is a useless technology and absolutely pointless in perusing at this point. It's cheaper and better to just go with LTE and there is a bit of room for upgrading in that stack.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

Shivetya 11y ago

It isn't just England. Even in many areas of the states getting a good cell connection can be frustrating. Half the time if I need data while on the road I will end up at a McD just to get a good connection.