UK joke or real?

bealtine

Theresa May has reportedly moved to quash an attempt by her cabinet colleague Sajid Javid to improve mobile phone coverage by warning that the plans could aid terrorists, according a leaked letter.

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/nov/05/theresa-may-not-spots-sajid-javid-mobile-phones

JohnC.

It's no surprise coming from Theresa May.

clohamon

The Register came up with these objections from the operators.

The operators' objections to National Roaming broadly fall into three categories. It would create practical difficulties, they argue; it “contradicts 30 years of policy” (as one told me yesterday); and ultimately it will kill off long-term investment in rural infrastructure.

We all fall down
Leading the first set of issues is resilience: what happens when one network goes down – and everyone switches to another network? If rural mobile infrastructure is so poor that one network can’t cope with its own subscriber base – how well will it cope with two? And ultimately – with four? In the event of a single network failing, a domino effect is likely, operators say, as the entire rural subscriber base attaches at once. And this has serious repercussions, given the reliance of vital services on mobile coverage. Hence today’s briefings from the Home Office that National Roaming puts state security at risk.

There are other technical objections, too. Operators don’t support in-call handover between networks: so even a National Roaming experience is likely to be an unhappy one for the user if they’re on the move. And phones would need to be reprogrammed to search more aggressively for a higher priority network – every few minutes rather than 3GPP default of every hour – resulting in much faster battery drain. (See 3.2.2.5 in the spec: [450kb PDF]).

watty

All twisting the truth. They do such arrangements bilaterally when it suits them.