Why such crap mobile reception in the UK?

[urquattroGus]

I am not sure if people agree, but its seems to me that mobile phone reception seems to be worse in the UK than it was.

One theory is possibly that as companies have merged, some masts have been shut down. The company I work at sells to farmers, and we know a good few who used to rent masts, but had notice served on them.

I live in Essex in a semi Rural area.

It never cease to amaze me how poor signal can be across the south east. It's the most densely populated area of the country, surely there should be good coverage!??

Whenever I travel to anywhere in Europe, or other countries such as Japan, the coverage seems to be so much better!

Big cities now have 4g and yet the rest of us can't even get a sodding GPRS or EDGE signal half of the time.

Do people agree?

I am finding it frustrating because we have 270 vehicles on the road, half of which are service vans.

We keep on being told to use the latest mobile data widgets, but none of them will work without a decent signal...

Anyway, half hear-ted rant, but surely this is holding back the UK just as much as broadband access.

[urquattroGus]

I am glad it's not just me then. At work we started to install repeaters a few years ago, and then found they were illegal, because the installers were tracked down by Ofcom,. and then they came after us to say the systems were not legal.

Using a repeater constitutes "broadcasting" and so you are not, or cannot get a license.

It's a shame really, we had a 900? (MHZ?) one that covered Vodafone and O2 at my depot. It changed it from no signal, to full strength throughout a large building.

Invaluable when you are trying to run a business and the copper wires down the road keep on getting nicked!