Originally Posted by Stereo Steve:
“I suppose, if we want our country to stay the way it is, with urban centers and rural retreats, then we have to accept that it is just going to cost to get essential services out to those areas. Not only for the people who live there but for those who want to visit (and who are very welcome to visit). I guess, I think I echo Moox's point (if I have got it right) that fast BB is now like water and electricity. You can barely get by without it unless you opt out of modern society in some way. So, it has become an essential utility and must realistically be rolled out across the whole of the UK.
There are a very few places who have no mains water and rely on a borehole and the same for electricity.
I suppose the frustration is that there are a lot of us who are not remote in the slightest. Live within 3 miles of a major town and between 2 major cities, 25 miles each way and yet are still in the third world in terms of telecoms with really nothing on the horizon other than the offerings of the mobile companies. It's a bit pathetic when you think about it.”
BIB - absolutely, and that raises a separate question; define 'rural'?
The OP is quite breezy about it, but there's no real strict definition of when an area stops being rural (village to large village, small town to town, town to large town etc). Regardless, O2 and Vodafone both class some distance around my area as 'rural' and have, ahem, 'invested' accordingly shall we say. In the meantime Three and EE have run away with things, and have unsurprisingly hoovered up any customers who actually want to use data and/or travel around a bit.
With that in mind, I tend to agree with all of this:
Originally Posted by GreenLantern:
“If Vodafone rollout anything that hasn't got some sort of flaw in it, or some sort of cost cutting measure baked in, or isn't oversubscribed 24hrs after its launched, I'll be impressed.
So no, I don't believe they will follow EE to 95% geo coverage, or if they do, as with their current rollout, it will again be totally flawed and barely worth them doing.
EE are far out ahead, their network, where I've used it, is leaps and bounds ahead of Vodafone's network and I'm a Vodafone fan, so I'm not just saying that.
I really really hope Vodafone at one point in the NEAR future pulls it together, I just don't see it happening, they failed their 3G rollout and they're failing their 4G rollout all over again.
I don't even know how people in Newbury and Paddington can sit there and think they are doing ok in the face of what EE are doing ? Are Vodafone just aiming to do well enough to get people onto the network and keep them there. I can't understand any reason at all (beyond roaming and cost) where someone who has used EE would choose Vodafone instead, I just can't.
Its not like Vodafone don't have the money to do this rollout properly either, why they got into bed with the most indebted company in the world to rollout a network is beyond me, I can only begin to think how many corners Telefonica are cutting on their part of the rollout. Its all about shareholder dividends to Vodafone and not about giving customers what they want, I'm nearly at the end of my tether with them and I'm sure a lot of other life long Vodafone customers are as well.
The only thing they're truly very good at is marketing their brand, which ultimately is just a smokescreen for how crap their network always was.”
Just to add; if Vodafone do pull a rabbit out of the hat here, and things get anywhere near an equivalent level of service to Three/EE here then good for them - I hope they do, because I want to be impressed by them, and to (quite frankly) have an option that isn't the usual Three/EE pairing would be a nice change. However as things stand it's not looking good; yes they (O2/VF) have rolled out some 4G here over the last few months now, but there's a problem - lack of masts (seriously, even with the sharing, O2/VF have about a quarter of the masts that Three/EE do, covering the same patch of area), an issue which with the best will in the world 800 alone simply can't resolve, which explains the rabbit mention.