In message , sacha
writes
On 2014-02-20 13:57:28 +0000, Dave Liquorice said:

On Thu, 20 Feb 2014 11:49:50 +0000, sacha wrote:

Can I get opinions from those in the west country about which
company
offers the best coverage?
Depends where you are. To define "where you are" a bit better
coverage can vary considerably between providers in the space of a
hundred metres or so.

We're both with Orange (now EE, I believe) and keep getting 'no
service'
messages or two bars at the most for a brief moment.
Orange and T-Mobile merged a while ago to form "Everything
Everywhere", which I think they have rebranded to EE. Far to easy to
change Everything Everywhere to Nothing Anywhere. B-)
As a result I believe that EE is in the process of rationalising the
combined networks and removing duplicate cells. There may be
"unexpected" consequences of this particularly if the old Orange and
T-Mobiles sites involved are not on the same mast.
Another possibility is that the cell you'd normally be connected
through is broken (rather than removed) and you are connecting to one
that only just provides service where you are. Try giving "customer
services" a call if you have a spare hour to listen to music...

Thanks to you all for these very helpful bits of information. It's
always been patchy round here (and just about non-existent on Dartmoor)
but I'm sure it's got worse. Perhaps, as you say, it's because EE is
fiddling about! Ironically, outside the village and behind a couple of
hills is a mast thingy but it doesn't stretch to us, obviously! Even
in our nearest town, the signal can be very iffy. I dread the prospect
of changing servers so I'll wait a couple of months to see what
happens. We use our mobiles rarely but when we need them, we do need them!
Basic PAYG phone are only a few quid these days. You know what EE is
like. Ask in UK.telecom and someone will tell you which suppliers ride
on which networks so you can try another one. There are only two or
three different networks.
--
bert