Combating Bad Phone Service
My battle against terrible phone signal
Last I checked I lived in 2013 in the centre of London, therefore I am afforded some technological luxuries that are less common place in the rest of the UK. I haven’t touched physical money or had to talk to a person at a checkout in over a year & I have come accustom to every single shop no matter how small having free wifi.
I’m aware of this privilege and try my hardest to not take it for granted, however what I can’t abide by is that in 2013 I still can’t trust my phone reception.
In January 2013 I had moved back from Amsterdam to London and needed to get a new phone contract. I had recently purchased an iPhone 5 ( 4G ready ) and obviously wanted to take advantage of my new pretty gadget. The only company offering 4G at the time was Everything Everywhere, EE, which is a combination of two phone networks TMobile and Orange.
I don’t believe I was an uninformed customer; I knew that both TMobile and Orange didn’t have a good reputation for mobile reception and I had researched about the 4G signal that EE were offering, so I was aware that apparently this signal was ‘low penetration’ eg. 4G wouldn’t work when I was in building with walls more structurely sound than lego bricks.
But I had an ace up my sleeve, I live in London! Technology typically radiates outwards from our capital. No network worth it’s salt would have bad reception in central London; I live in Notting Hill and work in Tottenham Court road which is pretty much central London. I quickly went to the closest EE store and signed up.
What’s the worst that can happen?
Day 1 was pretty exciting, I have 4G and I’m a massive geek so this is a big moment. Very few people were on 4G at the time so I had lots of bandwidth to myself. I walked around for a while until I got 4G reception and starting watching YouTube videos and generally marvelling at the speed I was getting.
This was shorted lived, the problem is not that EE doesn’t have good reception in London, this issue is that it isn’t reliable. You will be forgiven for thinking that I am an angry customer lashing out at EE, which I was but as with every rational individual I believed that instead of winging about anecdotal evidence I should try to conduct an experiment to see if I was just causing a fuss over nothing.
Experiment One — The new phone test
Methodology: This one is pretty obvious, swop phones and see if I have better experience. This was easier than expected as my current iPhone 5 had a very minor fault with it’s camera so it was relatively simple to go to the Apple Store and report the fault and get a new iPhone 5. Now I have a new phone, admittedly the same model of phone, I can see if anything is better.
Conclusion: It wasn’t! — however this is obviously not a great test, I used the same model of phone perhaps iPhone 5 is just a bad mobile phone for reception.
Experiment Two — The new new phone test.
Methodology: Pretty much the same as the first test but I swopped out my iPhone 5 for a Nexus 4 ( my work phone ).
Conclusion: It was a little better than the iPhone 5, which is probably a bad thing for my allegiance to the Apple Cult, but still pretty un-reliable. This is when I started making my mind up that EE was just rubbish and started sending them abusing tweets.
Experiment Three — Shit gets real
Methodology: This time I need something which is less anecdotal and more based on objective evidence. Unfortunately I don’t have much access to objective evidence so not having the patience or intelligence to conduct an appropriate test I opted to run a subjective test using lots of data which in theory should iron out the subjectiveness.
Where can I get access to lots of subjective data? Well Twitter obviously.
So the plan was to capture all tweets in the UK talking about bad signal @ one of the top three providers ( EE, Vodafone, O2 ), and hell why not map them on Google Maps to get a nice view of where in the UK has the worst signal.
Then my mind ran away with me as I thought, well why not try to turn this around. I still hate EE and I want a little bit to prove they are the worst network so why not release this as a website giving other’s this information so they too don’t fall into the trap of signing up with EE and wanting to murder someone every other day.
Ok cool, I have a project! There goes a month worth of my free time as I become obsessed at releasing No-Service
Conclusion: It’s been live for a good 3 months so far, and thanks to Google App Engine i’ve managed to host this site for free so far and I have some interesting results.
Red — Vodafone
Green — EE
Blue — O2
( origin http://www.no-service.com )
So what it looks like is that O2 are pretty much as rubbish with EE as a close second. What is strange though is that there seem to be a corrolation between bad tweets for O2 and EE. I wonder if they are using the same infrastructure?
We do have to consider that the networks might have different market shares to be fair. So I haven’t had much luck at quickly finding some 2013 figures but I did find some figures from 2010 when EE was released and it shows that the difference in the top 3 networks providers are not too much.
In summary it looks like if you want good phone reception you should really sign up for Vodafone! Which I shall be doing as soon as my contract ends.
Call to action!
If you are looking for a good way to scope out the reception in your area for any of the top three networks, Vodafone, O2 or EE then come to my website No Service you can look for your most common locations you use your phone and see what how people have been bad mouthing the reception in your area.
