Mobile phone signal often sucks indoors. Not a single network offers reliable signal in either my home or my office. Many of us have given up, turned on WiFi calling, switched to WhatsApp, and generally concluded that phones don’t work inside buildings anymore.
One of the issues is that as phones “advance”, we use more and more data. More data requires the greater bandwidth available at higher frequency radio waves, and higher frequencies are less good at penetrating buildings. The more data we use, the worse it gets, and this problem is likely to get worse in the future.
It’s also an issue that as we build energy efficient homes and offices. These are designed to reflect heat, which also blocks radio waves, so again, it’s likely to continue getting worse.
There is a solution: in urban areas, we could replace high-powered phone masts with a higher density low-power ones, placing one on each street, or inside large buildings as the Trafford Centre has already done.
But this is expensive. And this is where it intersects with the “efficiency” of the free market.
Right now, the four big network operators – o2, Vodafone, Three, and EE – all maintain their own networks. We’re paying for this through our phone contracts and because each provider only gets a quarter of the market, they can all only afford to build a shitty network that is pretty much as good as their competitor’s network, leaving a lot of people without signal and no better competitor to switch to.
This is unfortunate because building a network to support the entire population costs pretty much the same as building a network to support a quarter: most of the cost is in installing the infrastructure and not per-user utilisation costs, so having four separate networks that do the same thing is almost entirely redundant.
Instead, if we switched to a nationalised network, as we have with the national grid, there would be almost four times as much money to invest in infrastructure and we could have a much more reliable mobile network for potentially the same cost.
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This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 13th, 2026 at 11:00 am and is filed under Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.