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Listed below are comments made by johnp51 between Tuesday, 22nd April 2008 and Tuesday, 22nd April 2008.

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Mobile broadband - a spat over speed 8:04pm on 22 Apr 2008 I spent a weekend in Malham in the Yorkshire Dales recently, and was quite looking forward to a weekend without technology, in a cottage where there was even no Digital TV. After a while I started to get anxious with no mobile signals on my O2 mobile, my Vodafone usb "Broadband" card, or any of the Virgin phones the kids had. There were some brief periods when my O2 phone got a signal, and in one of these I managed to check my emails and discovered a really important message that needed a prompt reply. This necessitated a 10-mile drive to somewhere the Vodafone card could pick up a GPRS signal. Talking to the neighbours later, they said that eveyone in the village uses Orange as it gets a strong signal there.

It is obvious from this forum that 3 and T-mobile at least are sharing their radio networks. I wish they all could do the same. Ironically, when clearing the car out on arrival home, I found an old Orange PAYG SIM in the glove compartment, so perhaps we could have had a signal after all.

On of the interesting things was that the kids (10 and 13) found it really difficult to understand why there was no Digital TV and no Internet, two things they take for granted as essentials of life!

By the way, I use my Vodafone card on trains a lot, and it generally works most of the time, although there are always moments when the signal drops out, as there are when you use a mobile phone on the train. It is worse on Virgin and Cross Country trains where the thickness of the windows blocks some of the signal.

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