BT starts charging for caller display

Originally Posted by Matth

You get caller display included with any mobile network, maybe it's time for the landline to fade away unless you need it for ADSL, maybe the plain old telephone service has had it's day.

Fixed line phone services are cheaper. The mobile companies have got a lot of people trapped in long term, expensive monthly contracts whose only benefit is effectively unlimited voice calls, so people use their mobiles because they have the minutes, so they might as well use them. After a while, they realise they only use a mobile, never use a landline, and conclude that the landline must therefore be obsolete. You have to hand it to the mobile networks, they have played a blinder.

Nevertheless, I receive a lot of calls from Joe Public on my landline at home, where we take bookings for our B&B, and the truth is, almost all the calls we get are from domestic, fixed-line telephones. There undoubtedly a lot of people who now only use a mobile for anything, but in my experience there are still a lot more people who prefer to use a fixed line when they are at home in the evening.

[qasdfdsaq]

Fixed line are cheaper? Up until a few months ago the majority of mobile users were PAYG.

Zero line rental, and call costs as low as 3p per minute cross network - both of which are substantially cheaper than landline and come with *zero* lock-in.

And you still get free caller display, answerphone, and time sync as standard.

Who is offering 3p a minute on PAYG, and is there a minimum top up in order to get that rate?

[darren.b]

Originally Posted by Chris

Who is offering 3p a minute on PAYG, and is there a minimum top up in order to get that rate?

Three.
3p per min, 2p per SMS, 1p per MB. No minimum top-up, no tie-in. I ditched both contract mobile and landline as a result.

Here.

No coverage ... not even outdoor.

[qasdfdsaq]

They have the same coverage as EE, so if the UK's largest network (in terms of both customers and their >99% UK coverage) aren't in your area that's some extremely bad luck.

Actually that's what comes of living in rural Scotland. The only reliable network at my house is Orange 2G (which shows up as EE on my phone these days).

Coverage stats are expressed as a percentage of the population, not a percentage of the territory. In Scotland you can reach a reasonably high %age by only covering the central belt.

[qasdfdsaq]

Indeed, coverage is stated by population rather than area, and yes most of Scotland is sparsely populated.

However if you get Orange 2G you should also get 3, since 3 roams onto Orange 2G network wherever they (supposedly) don't have 3G coverage. 3 customers should have access to *all* of Orange and T-Mobile's 2G networks except in areas where they feel they have such good 3G coverage of their own there is no need.

Personally I'm finding much of rural Scotland actually has far better coverage than I became used to expecting, having lived in it 10 years ago, where barely getting 2G was a chore - now everywhere I go that used to have borderline 2G has 42Mbps 3G DC-HSPA+

Incidentally EE still claim to be on a rampage to upgrade 99.9% of their 2G transmitters to the hilariously inefficient 3G by the end of next year, having previously stated they intend to upgrade them all to 4G and later quietly dropping that statement...

That's useful information, thank you. I may well look into switching our mobiles over to Three. We still need a landline mind you, what with running a business from home (and relying on a wobbly ADSL service for our interwebs).

We noticed a new mobile mast on the hillside north of here a year or so back. It corresponds pretty closely with a splash of predicted Three coverage that, according to the map, doesn't extend to us, even though we have clear line of sight. I guess the power is too low.

I have to say, I am holding out much hope that eventually, 4G will allow us to route all our calls and data wirelessly, perhaps with some decent hardware and an external antenna on the house. The Scottish govt has a plan to enable 99% of homes for super fast broadband by 2020 but to do that for us, they will have to run a very long piece of fibre up the road from the nearest telephone exchange to serve a very few homes, or else install a satellite system that will be too expensive for any of us to use anyway.

[qasdfdsaq]

You could look up on www.sitefinder.ofcom.org.uk to see who the mast belongs to and its registered output power, from there you can get a more accurate idea of the coverage. But the most reliable way is to just get a free PAYG SIM off 3 and put it in your phone. As a hark back to the topic itself, they'll send you a free SIM with no tie-in and no commitments complete with all the "optional" crap BT charge extra for.

As for 4G, as I've mentioned EE plan to provide at least 99.2% coverage with "superfast" 3G and 4G has considerably more range (if done right, but only Vodafone and O2 are in a position to provide decent service over it, yet both companies are currently taking the "lazy" approach) so having it provide broadband to remote notspots is quite economical. If 3 put in coverage there (which I suspect they will, if they've just put a new mast in recently) then it's likely it'll get 4G, and on an unlimited package with line of sight you can expect ~100Mbps which could then be shared among a few locals.

Even without the government's involvement, you're likely to get 99% coverage anyway - as I say commercial deployments are targeting 98-99% coverage by population, and unless there's a disproportionate excess of single person homes in rural Scotland that'll likely mean a similar number of properties.

Mind you, now that I think about it if that new mast is a 3 mast it should also give you Orange/T-Mobile 3G signal too, as they all share the same 3G network.

Aha. A Tetra mast. Oh well.