Gigabit
Member
And this attitude is why our coverage is so poor. No other country in Europe works this way.
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Mobile coverage on railways - reforms under Labour
- Thread starter Gigabit
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And this attitude is why our coverage is so poor. No other country in Europe works this way.
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Decades ago it was 2G and 3G. The former probably still offers good coverage today, but it's for voice only. Useless for data.
Then 3G came along, which offered speeds of 384kbps - and then evolved to offer speeds nearer 10-20Mbps in good cases.
The problem is/was that 3G is circuit switched and cell breathing means that when a site is under load, the signal reduces to lower the coverage range. Given the demands for data now, that means 3G got worse and worse to become totally and utterly unusable.
Those sites built all over the UK also had microwave connections or 2 megabit copper backhaul.
When 4G came along, I don't think you necessarily realise how much of an investment there needed to be not only to upgrade the kit for packet-based/IP data, with new equipment, new antennas for new bands, and fibre backhauls or faster links. And 4G only came just over 10 years ago.
I am not going to pretend every network invested as much as they should, and EE under Olaf Swantee was one of the exceptions where he wanted to get the UK geographic coverage to over 95% and towards 99% (NOT population coverage). He later left and BT took over, so things didn't quite pan out. Then they had the ESN rollout which has not gone to plan.
For new sites, for years there has been loads of opposition to planned new sites - with 5G having gained a reputation as being the cause of all the world's ills. But worse than that, many sites on private land had landlords refuse access to do upgrades. They realised that they only had to allow access for maintenance, not upgrades, and as such farmers and churches have asked for ridiculous sums of money to allow upgrades - or have refused entirely. Vodafone has had cases where farmers were to allow access only to be threatened by the local community and pulled out of the deal last minute.
Having to remove existing kit (Huawei) has only made a bad situation worse.
The Government can do more to force through the building of new sites without months or years of delay (technically networks can force through work, but it is still costly and councils know they may lose eventually, but still drag things out by arguing that it can't go in a specific location so the network must seek a new location and spend a fortune on new drawings, surveys etc).
Oh, and I think it also makes a difference what network you're on because despite all that I've written above, I get pretty good reception on the railway in the south east (right down the south coast, Kent etc) and know of only a few blackspots that are annoying but relatively small and manageable when you know where they are.
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Of course networks work like that. You start by investing in areas with high demand and work out from there.
Modern networks are more software based so you can do certain upgrades relatively easily and cheaply, but you need that infrastructure built in the first place. We don't make it easy to construct new sites with opposition all over the place and everyone wanting to be paid a premium (e.g. farmers, churches and other business owners). If networks refuse to pay (and they often do) then that area will be stuck in the stone ages.
Look at any planning application and the objection letters. 90% will talk of the impact on house prices, 10% may be about radiation. The latter is easily debunked, and frankly I'm surprised the other 90% haven't worked out that most people looking to buy a property today will want good access to things like fibre and 4G/5G. If you have a good signal, you will likely be able to sell your property easier than if it's in a blackspot. But there you go.
Why would the railway pay for that? Carriers are the ones that need to pay for it, the network is under their ownership at the end of the day (this is what happens in France, even on the mandatory, by law, coverage area)
Gigabit
Member
Actually I find EE the worst indoors for where I live and work and has much worse coverage on the Alton to Waterloo line which I use frequently. There are large blackspots there that have never been fixed due to MoD land and other such things - but I note in most of these places there is NR infrastructure so I assume if it was opened up this would go some way to resolving the problem. On this line Vodafone and O2 lead by a country mile.
Whatever investment EE has supposedly done, has not been realised from a coverage POV, wherever I go. They are always the worst indoors.
But putting that aside, on the railway the solution is to allow the networks to build on Network Rail land/use their assets and not allow planning objections. Every other country seems to manage this, there is no excuse for the UK to not. We don't even get good coverage in tunnels, again something solved years ago in France, Italy, Portugal and many others.
I doubt they're always the worst indoors, but their use of higher frequency bands is probably one reason for this in a lot of places. They haven't used as much of their 800MHz spectrum as they could (probably because they have so little of it, so it will provide pretty low speeds). They are now able to use 700MHz for 5G, but until they launch standalone 5G you can't use 5G without having 4G access too - and if 4G doesn't work indoors then you can't use 5G.
Standalone is being trialled now, and once launched you may see it appear on a lot of sites and that's going to make a huge difference to indoor coverage. I don't have a clue how much it has cost, but it isn't cheap and a lot of investment doesn't net instant results but is part of a nationwide upgrade that, thanks to software based radio networks, can often go live almost all at once.
Vodafone and O2 has more low-frequency spectrum so may work better indoors, but more for calls than data. Data is likely not going to work that well.
Three has 700MHz on 4G and 5G, and where used on 4G there's no issue and you can benefit already. Indeed at home I get a very good signal indoors where they aggregate 700 & 800MHz bands.
Standalone is being trialled now, and once launched you may see it appear on a lot of sites and that's going to make a huge difference to indoor coverage. I don't have a clue how much it has cost, but it isn't cheap and a lot of investment doesn't net instant results but is part of a nationwide upgrade that, thanks to software based radio networks, can often go live almost all at once.
Vodafone and O2 has more low-frequency spectrum so may work better indoors, but more for calls than data. Data is likely not going to work that well.
Three has 700MHz on 4G and 5G, and where used on 4G there's no issue and you can benefit already. Indeed at home I get a very good signal indoors where they aggregate 700 & 800MHz bands.
Gigabit
Member
Excuse me, the worst indoors in every case I have tried them. Of course the statistics don't match up to that - but I can only comment on my experience. Come to my rural part of Hampshire, there will not be a single person on EE because of how terrible they are. All Vodafone and O2.
I do start to wonder if you work for EE, you come on here constantly and tell us how good they apparently are but in the real world I find nothing about them that makes me want to switch. There is only one network that doesn't work at home and that's EE. No low band spectrum, nothing deployed to get through the walls. So much for that "99% geographic" claim you said.
It's all very well having these "gigabit" speeds but if they don't work as soon as I step in my home, it's all slightly irrelevant. EE has always had a problem where they put out these big numbers but don't work well indoors.
But to get away from Network A vs Network B, none of the network are good enough on the railway. They all have far too many blackspots. A good 15-20% of the journey from Alton to Waterloo will have no service on any operator. That's not good enough.
No need to be so rude and snarky. I literally said why Vodafone and O2 might work better indoors, and you confirmed what I said - and now you're moaning!
I don't work for EE, but so what if I did? Have I said anything that was biased? Am I trying to sell EE to you?
I gave reasoned arguments to your theory that it's a 'nonsense excuse' and if you wish to continue in blissful ignorance then you do you.
I bet the reason why you have poor coverage in the above mentioned locations is PRECISELY because of what I said above - but you believe what you want to believe.
Gigabit
Member
You literally gave me a sales pitch about how good EE's coverage is, "they will reach 99% and have invested blah blah". But as I said, leaving that aside...
The reason the coverage is so poor on all operators on the SWR mainline, is that they can't install the equipment close enough to the railway to get into the carriages. In the blackspots I have mentioned, there just simply isn't availability to get the equipment there. In several cases it's MOD land which they can't use, so the workaround would be to get the equipment onto Network Rail land instead. There's no reason we can't do this like other countries do. As I said, this is presumably already covered by GSM-R so these towers could be modified to support MNO equipment.
I wasn't being snarky, you just read my post the wrong way.
No, I said a previous CEO wanted to do that. And it didn't happen. Hardly much of a sales pitch.
The alternative was to keep Huawei equipment in the backbone of the country's internet, after they had been declared a security threat.
Gigabit
Member
You took a slight at the other networks whilst doing it, you were clearly trying to big up EE. That's fine, I can see you like using them. All the power to you.
But please get back to the point of the thread.
In the points I made, what is your alternative to just building the sites on Network Rail land? They won't be able to use the MoD land because of security issues but Network Rail have no issue putting up masts, we just need them to be allowed to site MNO equipment.
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I'm just saying this idea the coverage on the railway hasn't been improved because of this seems far-fetched. And anyway, the networks must have known Huawei was going to get banned, the fact they didn't plan for it is their problem, not the government's. In any case, of course Huawei should be banned.
The government permitted a company, NR spent money to gain capability. The government banned a company, NR spent money to achieve the same capability from new parts. You're using too much hindsight. You can see this affecting private companies too, we just don't watch their finances as closely.
I have SIMs on every network (multiple SIMs on some in fact). My advice to most people with a dual SIM phone (or one with eSIM) is to have one on EE and Vodafone, or Three and O2 (or EE/O2 Three/Vodafone). While there are increasingly more standalone sites as the partnerships end, EE and Three still share a LOT of sites and so does O2 and Vodafone.
By having two SIMs you can benefit from the best of both worlds. Of course there are places, especially in the south west, where there's nothing on anything (well, likely 2G but that's good only for voice calls which barely anyone wants to make these days).
EE does, however much you like it or not, offer the best data speeds and consistency from multiple independent tests, with Vodafone and Three often a very close second. Three has even overtaken in some areas thanks to its targeted investment in towns to give gigabit 5G and offer 5G as a home or office broadband service.
Speeds of 1.6-1.8Gbps are perfectly attainable if you're near one. EE is now offering 1-1.5Gbps in more places, but it's very localised and not something we should expect anytime soon for railway travel. That said, sites near the railway does mean you can - for example at Brookmans Park - experience 1Gbps when passing through at 100mph.
Vodafone uses DSS to share spectrum across 4G and 5G, but the 3G switch off has had many unintended consequences and hopefully once addressed, you'll see big improvements. O2 still hasn't turned off 3G so is way behind in that regard, and 3G (as said before) is absolutely unfit for purpose these days. Again, when they do and refarm the spectrum to 4G expect big improvements - especially indoors.
To reiterate, EE can often be worst for indoor coverage through its decisions on the base layer for 4G being 1800MHz, and others using 800MHz. Lower frequencies travel further. It wasn't just a lack of investment, rather a lack of bandwidth following the 4G auctions years ago.
We can see from the project to cover the railway down to Brighton how things will hopefully be for the rest of the railway. Lineside sites, leaky feeders and so on. This solves the planning issues, but it doesn't actually help those living in rural communities that are anti-mobile. Sure, some might get some coverage if close but otherwise this still doesn't fix the bigger problems.
Finally, why should Huawei have been banned? Because Trump said so? Because others followed suit because of his threats to trade if we didn't bow down to him? It was 100% political.
Most (not all) people in the industry didn't believe Huawei had any rogue code, and indeed GCHQ worked with Huawei on the code to ensure it was all above board.
The belief that Huawei would risk its entire business future by being caught listening into calls or capturing data (which would likely have been easily detected by various agencies) is as crazy as the car industry now claiming that all Chinese cars have a kill switch and one day the Communist government is going to make every car it ever made grind to a halt.
Why would they do this? They could only do it once, and then that's it - their trade is finished and total economic disaster.
The irony is that Huawei is now selling phones freely around the world again, complete with Google services and US-made chipsets. So where's the fear and outrage now?
mike57
Established Member
Thats what I have, I used to spend a lot more time travelling than I do now, and I have my main contract on 3 and a small contract (in terms of allowances) on O2 which I can use if 3 is poor or no signal. Apart from obviously remote areas its very rare I get caught with no signal. My Samsung S22 Ultra supports two physical SIM cards so if I were travelling abroad regularly I could replace the O2 sim with a local one. Phone setup for dual sim is straight forwards once you have done it once.
So if travelling by train I just select which ever network is best at that time
I've recommended this to people for years. It's so easy to get a PAYG SIM for the second account, or just a cheap pay-monthly deal on a rolling contract for relative peanuts. £8 for 30GB of data on O2 suits me fine as a backup, for example.
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Gigabit
Member
None of this is relevant to the topic which is about improving coverage on the railway for all operators.
Let’s get back to discussing that.
A single train operator would surely help, as they would be able to make decisions for the network as a whole as opposed to the piecemeal approach at present. The Brighton Mainline approach looks like a good start but has been agonisingly slow.
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Why, what’s their involvement on NR land?. After working with NR you’d then only be limited by road access to the site, nearby internet and power (what if they’re on the wrong side of the tracks?) and planning permission.
Gigabit
Member
If it was all brought together as Labour have proposed - again, the discussion of this thread - they could make decisions up and down the country. At the moment you don’t have that because of how fragmented it is.
I’d change the law so planning opposition for this wouldn’t be possible and I’d allow NR/GBR to use their GSM-R masts for MNO use.
What fragmentation? Anything to do with the physical infrastructure is the responsibility of Network Rail. They can already make decisions up and down the country, apart from the bits devolved to Scotland and Wales.
edwin_m
Veteran Member
GSM-R is based on 2G and increasingly inadequate for the railway's future data transmission needs. I believe the upgrade path is something that makes much more use of more recent technology from the wider market. If NR rolls this out network-wide, will this provide coverage for the other networks too?
Gigabit
Member
The people operating the trains, don't operate the track. They have the main interest in seeing improved coverage for Wi-Fi amongst other things but because they don't control the infrastructure, they get stuck. If it was all under one operator of track and train, you could have this body doing coverage wholesale. There could be a massive income for them contracting out a service to deliver 4G/5G across the entire network and then selling it open-access.
Look at what Bodlyn have done on the London Underground.
If the ToCs really thought that improved coverage was a game changer for them, they would be paying the mobile operators to install more masts or petitioning government to allow commercial use of NR’s infrastructure. It doesn’t need the two to be under one roof.
Unless somehow NR was going to acquire a chunk of spectrum, they’re going to be working with the mobile operators. They won’t be using the GSM-R network as the whole point is it’s separate for safety.
Where is this massive income coming from? Government forced all the operators to make their on train WiFi free.
Indeed. It is about more than just opening up masts and poles for the networks to add their equipment to. The sites would need fibre connectivity, as I'm sure much of the NR infrastructure is way worse than even the 3G networks in the mid to late 2000s.
Using private investment to run fibre, much of which can be done lineside, could enable Network Rail or GB Rail or whatever to work towards switching to LTE-R, or even a 5G (NR-R?) based setup.
Obviously there's the additional cost with regards to upgrading the train equipment, although I am sure LTE-R radios are backwardly compatible with GSM-R, just as 5G devices support all previous digital standards.
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And in most cases you're better off using your own connectivity. Of course some rolling stock makes getting a good signal indoors a problem, but even with a multi-SIM setup from Icomera there's going to be a limit to what you can share to multiple users. If the train has an outdated modem that doesn't support all bands or carrier aggregation, it will never even achieve the maximum speeds you could get on your latest-gen smartphone!
Wi-Fi is useful for people who don't wish to use a hotspot to get their tablet/Kindle/laptop online, and I don't think there's any reason to get rid of it, but the future is not Wi-Fi. That itself has loads of issues with security and interference, and most trains are using only Wi-Fi 4, or maybe 5, at perhaps 20 or 40MHz max. Wi-Fi 6 and 7 may come, but is it really worth it?
Gigabit
Member
If Network Rail leased out all of their GSM-R sites for MNOs to use, I can assure you there would be a very large income stream for them. The MNOs won't use GSM-R but they can use the sites themselves and put their equipment on them as the sites are well placed for railway connectivity.
SWR did a project with EE to increase coverage - with very limited success it must be said - specifically to improve their Wi-Fi. There is consumer demand for better Wi-Fi on trains and also for much better connectivity. None of this is new or controversial.
There is a massive dark fibre network that NR owns that they've been trying to sell off/lease out for ages to a commercial property. This would be ideal for connectivity for the MNOs and was one of the things they said it could be used for.
What there isn't though is commercial demand. How much extra a month are you willing to pay for your phone contact in order to get slightly better mobile phone access on a train? For most people, that figure will be £0.
Gigabit
Member
The networks seem to think it's a priority, with Three having signed a deal with Cellnex on the Brighton Mainline and Vodafone and others having done projects at major railway stations.
You're incorrect.
Shaw S Hunter
Established Member
I would suggest you are both right. With free on-board wi-fi having been mandated by the DfT any u-turn would be extremely unpopular now. OTOH the MNOs have to cover the cost of its provision so doubtless they are taking advantage of the current regulation around annual price increases to ensure that happens.
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