Mobile coverage mash up

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Typically, this was an awesome day (job) with a massive low (death). Just another day in the broadband campaign world. However, our approach by car to Leeds (top 10 city in UK), highlighted the utter failure of the mobile network. For broadband in-fill - fugged about it.

This blog post can be read at 5tth.blogspot.com

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Spent the day at Leeds Uni - awesome! Made far more exciting by it being my PA's alma mater (LOL not maitre d') and it is fresher's week. But Leeds has changed since my dad's and my time, and discovering that there is no mobile coverage up to about 200m of the ring road from the north (for no apparent reason) stimulated a discussion about using mobile broadband as an infill for the USO. (How much do you want to be in our car on journeys such as these?!)

Has anyone mapped the reality of mobile coverage in the UK? It is bloody awful. We drove down the A1 from just below Scotch Corner and had fairly consistent NON COVERAGE for miles and miles and miles. We thought, as we were approaching Leeds, we might be able to contact our meeting participants to say we were approaching Leeds. Nope.

We were just approaching the Roundhay Park turning on the ring road before the mobile coverage kicked in, and Leeds was laid out before us by then. You are going to use mobile coverage to provide the USO????? I think not. I don't care if your mast looks like a tree or a pigeon, you need to map the mobile notspots. They are HUGE, gaping holes across the UK.

Mobile broadband is not a goer. I can drive miles without mobile coverage, whilst remaining less than 100 miles from Orange HQ in Darlington.

If you continue to try and "sell" me mobile broadband, I will take a week off, map everywhere in Cumbria and North Yorkshire where no mobile signal is available (an offer I made over 10 years ago for the YDNPA and the Tourist Board through the UWN - get on Google to find the links!), and blow you out the water for even offering such a simplistic, undeliverable solution.

If you - Orange, O2 etc - cannot deliver mobile coverage within metres of the Leeds ring road, why would we believe you can cover rural areas?????

And let me put this really simply. You - Ed Vaizey et al, who sit in Westminster and think the rest of the UK has the same mobile coverage, allow me to drive you from Penrith to Scotch Corner via the B roads. There is bugger all mobile coverage, even in major tourist honey pots like Hawes. This plan needs re-thinking, mate.