Driving home on the M25 and trying (stupidly) listen to Spotify in the car via a Three Mobile connection (yes, futile I know), it made me wonder if such things will ever be possible.

I’d imagine at some point in the future, be it via 10g, satellite, or whatever, that we will all be able to get data wherever we want.

Is this conceivable and how far in the future? Considering a decent 3g signal is still a bit of a luxury, maybe it’s a very long way off

It may be possible along most main roads and around most centres of habitation, but there will always be pockets in the countryside where there is no signal, either due to the geography or restrictions on the siting of masts.
Avebury is a case in point, being a World Heritage site, there are no masts around the village, although it’s possible to pick up a signal on some networks outside.
O2 has no signal at all in the centre of the village, yet I’ve picked up a 4G signal around 3-400 metres along a little lane leading to the Ridgeway.
West Woods, further along towards Marlborough, has absolutely no signal at all, yet it’s only a couple of miles from the A4.
4G allegedly has greater range, so things may improve, but so far I just laugh at anyone who goes on about not bothering keeping their music local, on a phone or pod, because the Cloud can stream everything.
Yeah, right, sure it does. 🙄

The **** mainline trains from Edinburgh/York etc to London can’t get 3G (particularly bad just outside London) . What hope for everywhere else?

I was thinking more along the lines of advancement in technology making it possible, not particularly having a mast at every line of sight

Wifi repeating is the obvious solution, using all wifi locations to provide it.

I live just north of Birmingham and apart from the crap signal in my kitchen it is pretty mush spot on everywhere else. I can get a really fast 3g signal all over the place.

I live just north of Birmingham. I can get a really fast 3g signal all over the place.

Well, that’s one reason to live there I suppose 😐

😉

Well, that’s one reason to live there I suppose

That and the alpine resort of cannock chase…

What johndoh & CountZero said. I still assume there’s something wrong with my phone every time I drive between Hungerford and Marlborough because I can’t comprehend that there’s no phone signal at all three miles from the M4 / 10 miles from Swindon / 30 miles from Bristol. And as a regular user of the Kings Cross to Edinburgh train line I find it absolutely scandalous that the only choice available to maintain a data connection is to pay through the nose for the frankly awful on board wifi!!
New infrastructure is desperately needed, but given that pretty much all the decision makers live in large cities with uninterrupted 4g reception outdoors and high speed fibre optic broadband indoors, that is sadly unlikely to ever be a priority.

100% is very hard with the terrain without putting a cell tower on every hill or jacking up the power enough to give people brain cancer (or more brain cancer than we’re already getting with all the 2.4Ghz radio buzzing around us).

A useful amount providing 99% coverage to all habitable and transportation areas though, yes. However operators need to see profit in it.

I accept no mobile coverage out in the hills when riding, and in a way I’m thankful. However what really annoys me the most is poor coverage on trains on mainline commuter routes in and out of London. South West Trains is terrible.

That said, using normal cells to cover it is a technical complexity due to constant fast moving trains (well maybe not fast if they’re SWT 😉 ), switching cells frequently, dropping out of coverage between towns and villages, high sided embankments, tunnels etc. They could line the embankments with cells, but it’s far better to put femtocells within the trains. That then comes down to deals between operators and trains.

As an FYI, with data you’ll notice the data rate often drops when moving, which is a symptom of being in motion against the network signal. Again, femtocells would solve that, but better to go with WiFi on trains, which also allows them to charge for the service 😉

Rumour has it that when the mobile operators bid for the contracts they had to provide 95% coverage to the population within x years – in france they had to cover 95% of the road network, so they get a much better coverage than us.

Not sure it is true but I wish we had done something similar

I’m on EE and use streaming spotify all the time (as the GPS tracker in my van interferes with radio reception). (however I stream standard quality, perhaps high quality would show more dropouts to to higher data rate)

Very rare for it to drop connection. I’ve not looked into 3g boosters but might be worth a look if you do struggle with data connection in the car.

With 4g the cellsites are getting much smaller and local, so more of them needed but much less of an issue with planning as instead of a huge mast they can just be plonked halfway up a lamppost, in a phone box, petrol station roofs etc.

i assume you really need to be on unlimited data to listen to spotify whilst travelling then, yep?

It helps, unless you pay for it and dl the music to your device beforehand.

Deadkenny speaks a lot of sense, although the femtos/repeaters on the trains still need to connect to the mobile network somehow – but at least you can use big external aerials.

Mobile phone signals are just radio. Can you pick up perfect Radio 1 for 100% of the UK? And that’s with frequencies that propagate better than mobile phone signals (kHz/low MHz vs 800-900Mhz up to 2.4GHz).

Mobile phone networks are also businesses and providing coverage is expensive. Between the networks the capital spend is probably £1-2 billion per year. Would you be happy for your bill to double to support the increased investment?

That’s traditional networks. Old style satellite networks (e.g. GlobalStar) never became commercially viable, they were rubbish indoors and the handsets were huge and needed lots of power. New ideas – Project Loon, the low orbit networks being proposed by Google/SpaceX/Virgin Galatic, solar powered autonomous high-altitude planes, airships etc. might give decent outdoor coverage over wide areas at a reasonable cost. Project Loon is in trial with a number of major networks in Australia/NZ (Google need the networks as they own the spectrum).

🙁 until it goes Satellite nothing will improve. I need to go 6 miles down the road to even send a text! And we are only 10 miles from the Motorway system so not that remote really. Just a small valley with few inhabitants. Zero incentive for the providers to stick up a mast just for 50 people. Funnily enough though the emergency services have an Airwaves antenna about 100 yards from my house which probably serves 1 incident every 5 years. I am sure that thing would run 4G all day long if I could work out how to hack into it 🙂

Satellite is very slow and expensive and cannot handle the bandwidth, so that will never take over from cellular masts.

As for nationwide coverage, O2 can’t even maintain a signal from Cambridge to London on the main train line (a massive commuter line), so I wouldn’t hold your breath.

It basically boils down to cost, it costs billions to roll out a patchy nationwide network. To get 100% coverage would cost a huge amount with no increment in revenue, so no one is going to bother. Pretty much everyone is on flat rate tariffs, so you pay the same each month regardless of how much data you use or how much coverage you had. To expect the MNOs to fork out 10s of billions more to improve coverage for no extra revenue ……

Why can’t the rail network route data down their overhead lines or through the electrical rail line as is possible in homes? Just need a small modification to the pickup, a router and then relay wi-fi through the length of the train surely? May be a problem with diesel trains but they’ll be out of commission in the not too distant future.

**edit** just thought they may not have an earth line which I think the homeplugs use?

Why can’t the rail network route data down their overhead lines or through the electrical rail line as is possible in homes?

Noise from the motors would swamp any signal, plus the cable run lengths are a bit longer than 20m round a house.

Driving home on the M25 and trying (stupidly) listen to Spotify in the car via a Three Mobile connection (yes, futile I know), it made me wonder if such things will ever be possible.

The coverage is probably there. I have a lot of data problems when I’m in the old smoke and there abouts though – usually sat nav apps falling over because they can’t download mapping data fast enough – even at london rates of travel- and its not the availability of the a signal – its everyone else in the traffic you are in is using data also – its contention. I get the same issue when I’m in Glasgow city centre, perfectly good signal and I can make calls all day long but data is unusable until teatime when suddenly all the office workers updating their facebooks go home and suddenly it works fine

Coverage could improve a lot if the operators shared networks more. If you can’t get a signal on your network, why can’t you roam on to another.
And it would be more worthwhile for building masts in rural areas, as they could share the costs etc.

If someone had told us a few years ago that we would be watching hundreds of tv channels on our phones we’d have probably laughed.

Just curious what the future might bring us with internet access

Instead the told us about hover boards. I want one. We were promised them. I feel very badly let down.

Third rail on trains have gaps around points and stuff. Often where you hear the air con go off and there’s a ‘bang’ outside when it hooks up again (tedious commutes made me notice 😀 )

Some do WiFi and many are planning to stick more WiFi in. Not sure how they get the signal to the train though. Problem is so far they stick WiFi on the cross country trains, not the typical commuter trains, plus you have to pay usually unless 1st class.