Quarter of Brits don't believe that cell towers improve phone reception Just over three-quarters of UK residents recognise that being near a base station improves one's mobile reception, which makes one wonder how the rest think cellular phones work. The numbers come from the Mobile Operators Association, which got YouGov to ask 2,500 people about mobile coverage and turned up that nugget along …
Was in discussions with Estate Agent about house sale and reminded her I was sailing in the Atlantic to Greenland for the following fortnight so could not be contacted till I got back.
Her response "but arn't you taking your mobile with you?"
Further discussions revealed she had no idea where Greenland was.
"That's what happens when you have tax and welfare systems designed to counteract the effects of evolution."
As opposed to systems where a small group of inbred lack-wits are the only ones who can afford to live comfortably because they've inherited all the money and power? Tell me, how does this fit in with your skewed ideas of what evolution is?
Do most people equate "reception" with "does it work well"?
If so, it could be that network congestion, not link signal strength is the determining factor.
I get a nice strong 5 bars signal, but 3g is rubbish in the evening when everyone gets home and starts playing with their phones or wireless internet.
It depends on how the question is phrased. Does being "near" a base station improve my mobile reception, clearly to an extent yes, but within a certain radius it's going make bugger all difference. And anyone working in a high office block will know that you can be just a few floors below the base station on the roof and still get horrid reception because the transceivers are focussed on surrounding areas, not directly below.
To summarise - ask a silly question....
<Pedant_mode>
They would be correct too. A cell tower can't make a phone receive signals from a mast better, that's down to the design of the antenna in the phone.
If you had asked do more cell towers improve the quality of mobile phone coverage then that might have had a different response.
</Pedant_mode>
The 'Association is also keen to point out that while almost 70 per cent of us access government resources in our computers, one-tenth that number do so from a mobile phone, a figure the 'Association turns into a plea for more base stations.
Yeah that has nothing to do with basestations and everything to do with how terrible the government websites are to navigate. And they're even worse on the mobile versions.
I wasn't really trying to troll, although I do admit that, reading it back, it does look rather trolly. What I was trying to do is point out that there are a lot of people here who will be happy to sneer at the stupid people who don't understand about how radio communications work. However, many of these people also make comments about climate which would result in the same sort of derision at the Met Office or many universities. It was more of a "get your own house in order before you start sneering at other people" type of comment.
It's really quite widespread amongst people who actually are rather clever at the stuff they do know about. They look at another complicated industry or field - climatology, railways, broadband, water distribution - and determine that because that industry has failed to reach absolute technical perfection it must be down to the people who work in that industry being complete idiots. Complete idiots who are probably corrupt, and who actually plan their work to incorporate as much evil as possible.
It's a stunning lack of empathy - whatever industry you are in, if you've spent 20 years being educated and trained and gaining experience and have tried to wrestle with whatever big problems are prevalent in your field - why would you not then consider that people in other industries are similarly skilled, intelligent and committed?
Railways - Trains can't run in every conceivable weather and can be expensive - must be caused by idiots.
Broadband - High speed connections are expensive & geographically limited - caused by idiots.
Water distribution - Lots of leakage, hosepipe bans in summer, no national network - caused by idiots.
In reality, most problems of this type are caused by the need to compromise the best technical solutions with the available funds - which for most industries means the price model the market will support. Or put another way - you get what you pay for at both a macro and a micro level. There's no idiocy involved - apart from perhaps government not realising that the privatisation of utilities and the subsequent race to the bottom in pricing might not be the best model for sustained, sensible infrastructure investment.
"Water distribution - Lots of leakage, hosepipe bans in summer, no national network - caused by idiots."
Well actually it is. As somebody with two degrees, and having spent many years mananging the capital programme of a major water supplier, I think I'm well placed to comment on this one. I'll put it in a nutshell: National Grid Gas lose somewhat less than half of one per cent of the gas put into supply, and that's with an invisible and compressed gas (doesn't even smell in the NTS, 'cos the smell's not been added). The water companies lose around 20% of the water they put into supply. And that "around" is as good as it gets, because there's no accurate measuring of water supplied by the treatment works, so nobody even knows that the starting value is.
The key think that drives leakage is network age, and the way you fix it is to renew the network, prioritising according to what leakage data you have estimated, and correlating facts like burst frequency and condition surveys. So why do we still lose a fifth of our water? Because there's four lots of idiots involved.
1) Customers are idiots to expect perfect service on the cheap; Either accept the leakage and restrictions, or accept the need for higher bills to renew networks at three to five times the current rate, for a period of fifteen years. Last time I looked the renewal rate for water mains in the UK implied they would need to last an average of one hundred years, and sewers two hundred.
2) Water companies are idiots for not putting the straight facts out there as a choice for people to make. They know the facts, but the decisions are made by the next two groups of idiots.
3)) The regulator is an idiot. Well, maybe that's overdoing it, as OFWAT have been one of our better (if unrecognised) regulators. Even so, OFWAT should have taken the lead on encouraging the right things to be done, rather than being a patsy for my next group of idiots:
4) Politicians are idiots (and thieves, and liars, and hypocrites). In 1997 water bill increases were limited by the Blair government telling OFWAT to reign in water company capex. That was purely to be seen to do something about the fat cat water industry ahead of the election, but to achieve that OFWAT had to reduce the permitted network renewal investment programme. So playing silly beggars in Parliament reduced the rate of network renewal, then the very same people stand up and spout rubbish about water companies not fixing leaks. The EU deserves a dishonourable mention here for things like the nitrates directive, that cost billions to introduce on the basis of some vague and unproven links between the rare blue baby syndrome and nitrate levels in water. The billions spent on that could have been spent on renewing the pipes, instead of pointless changes to harmless residues in water. I could go on at length, but you hopefully get the point.
You suggest that privatistion is a race to the bottom - I'd just like to point out that the sorry state of the British public sector water services in 1989 was down to fifty years of public sector mismanagement, inefficiency, and under-investment, and the private sector is still working to over come this on a shoestring budget.
> Just over three-quarters of UK residents recognise that being near a base station improves one's mobile reception.
Considering you can get a mobile phone signal all the way on the Ayrshire->Belfast ferries (and quite possibly the Holyhead->Dublin ones as well), it comes down to your definition of "Near".
Yes, when you prompt your average-person-on-the-street to think about it, they will realise that each tower has a limited capacity, and if everyone and their dog is using their mobiles, then more towers are needed (or tighter directional cells on towers)
I'm not overly surprised.
I remember seeing a small community actively campaign against a new tower being located in their village, due to it's proximity to a school. They were successful and the tower was never built, however within a month the local paper ran a story in which they all complained about the rubbish mobile signal.
Tower and rubbish signal were the same network and yet they didn't connect the dots.
Wrote :- "I remember seeing a small community actively campaign against a new tower being located in their village, ... the tower was never built, however within a month the local paper ran a story in which they all complained about the rubbish mobile signal."
ALL? I very much doubt it. Probably mostly different sets of people. Different groups of people start throwing toys from their prams for very different reasons. It is a widespread human fallacy that other people hold strong views on the same issues as yourself.
People, even bright people, don't think much about areas outside their expertise.
If you asked a trivial question about the influence of case law on judicial outcomes, or the way anaesthetic works, you'd find less than 100% accuracy from the relatively smart lot who spend too much time here.
General knowledge isn't that useful in getting ahead, so people who gather it tend to do so more as a hobby than anything else.
My living room is an intersection point between 3 masts, so despite - according to Orange's customer service team - 'superb' coverage, holding my phone completely still it will, over any given 90 second period, go from 5 bars to 'Searching'.
Get the same result on Skoadfone & O2, altho in the bedroom rather than living room! We've reintroduced a telephone chair into our array of furnishings.
There is a bad side of having a source of strong signal nearby (or God forbid, more than one source!). Radio reflections on all sorts of stuff, which are causing interferences with the actual signal. The stronger (or closer) the signal is, the stronger the reflections are.
I get great mobile coverage at home with a mast just down the other end of the road. When I say great we get about 10 meg speeds from mobile broadband on T-Mobile.
In comparison our home broadband runs at around 1.5 meg and is a general problem on our development of new build houses. I'd rather get better ADSL speeds or have Virgin Media available.
UK Mobile coverage is pretty good these days, i'm in the North West personally and find at home and in cities 3G coverage is great. Don't have a 4G device yet but imagine that it's still limited to city centres in the 12 or so cities that were announced by EE.
The reason for confusions about radio transmission may be not just that people aren't terribly bright. It could be down to the disinformation that was spread a few years ago.
For example, a local women's group, campaigning against 'phone masts, arranged lectures from "a UK expert" who was supposed to be a physicist at the University of Warwick. He maintained that in order to reduce radiation, and the health risks that this presents, especially to children, it would be necessary to make towers more powerful but to have fewer of them and site them further away from residential areas. Explanations of the inverse square law notwithstanding, some people were clearly convinced by his arguments.
Once absurd factoids like this have come into being they tend to stick around for some while, it being generally easier to accept a lie than discover the truth.
If you think that's bad, you should have a shufti at the BBC HYS comments about the 3p fuel duty rise. (Yes,really.)
It's all the fault of illegal immigrants and dole scroungers, apparently. Oh, and those greedy, inconsiderate bastards with kids.
Shudders.
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