Trying to sell your house? It'd better have KILLER mobile coverage Young property buyers see mobile coverage as a more important when it comes to choosing a location – rating it as more important than proximity to schools and transport or local crime rates, says a report commissioned by mobile survey company RootMetrics. It’s long been known that the main reason people change mobile networks …
Mobile coverage in my house is hopeless due it would appear to some sort of iron (aka magnetic) based compound in the bricks. However a femotocell soon fixes that and all the networks will provide one if prompted. Even at £100 it would be small beer in comparison to the cost of a house.
What is more important is good internet connectivity, aka can I get FTTC, FTTP or cable. Clearly the people in the survey are rather clueless.
Absolutely. I work from home, so when I was looking for a new place the first thing I checked after spotting a candidate was whether I could get FTTC. A few places were rejected outright because it could only get 4-6Mb/s so-called-broadband.
Mobile coverage can be fixed with a femto-cell, crap broadband may never get sorted
"a femotocell soon fixes that and all the networks will provide one if prompted"
Ha ha ha ha ha ha! Please try to order a contract from Three along with a femtocell and see how you get on. Then repeat the process with EE. For a laugh you could then try O2.
Once you've finished wasting your time talking to their call centres, who have no idea what you're talking about (even if you use the brand names they use for femtocells themselves) you'll realise the appalling state of our mobile comms industry.
EE suggested that I sign up for a two year contract, then "if" I couldn't get a signal, then they "might" be able to sort out a solution.
Three have tried that, but then suggested that they wouldn't sell me a contract at all because: "We don't like to sell products where we know there are going to be issues."
I live in a house with 3 foot thick walls, partly sunk into the ground, pretty much nothing gets in or out, no matter what your coverage checker says. They weren't designing for mobile signal in the 1700s.
Vodafone will flog you one though, and it works pretty well.
"Vodafone will flog you one though, and it works pretty well."
While I approve of the Vod Sure Signals, I find it pretty appalling that they *charge* you and use the broadband that you pay for to fix their inability to provide a signal where you live. It's like they think they're doing you a favour.
This particularly galling with the first gen versions that were pretty poor at keeping a connection to Vod's servers, and required several lengthy reboots to start working again.
Yeah? Well you must be very special then, as the last time I tried it Orange said "Oh, here's your PAC".
They just did the same with our works contracts.
After the frustration of trying to get 3 to speak any sense, I can't see me ever using them anyway.
BTW, any company who grunts, then puts you through to someone who answers the phone with "Shebang!" aren't serious about selling contracts to businesses.
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They might well do, but as I'd called a number on the 3 website, been speaking to somebody in 3's "business" team, and was transferred to "someone who can help", "Shebang!" wasn't exactly the response I was expecting.
I'm sure quite a few companies with silly names answer their phones with their silly names, but that's not really the point; I had no idea who these people were, and hadn't (knowingly) called them!
I'd rate "Internet connection prospects" better than most things mentioned on that page.
But, of course, location, location, location (which in turn gives you some guarantees on schools, nightlife, chances of some bloke pilfering your car, etc.).
Pick a nice area. Then make sure you've got Internet. Because that's one thing you won't be able to "fix" yourself. Mobile signal? If your internet is good enough, get your own personal picocell. But chances are that if you're in a nice, internet-connected area, there's going to be mobile signal anyway.
OK, as a prospective purchaser, this is good, since the lack of coverage may be used to reduce the purchase price. One may thus obtain such a dwelling for a lower cost (since the demand is lower, … right?), and then simply install an EE Signal Box or equivalent other femtocell (or whatever they're called these days). These certainly work fine over ADSL2+ on BT 21CN, no DOCSIS 3.0 or VDSL2 required (remember, voice bandwidth is very low). If one is selling the house and wishes to maximise the sale price, simply provide this information to a prospective buyer.
They have a checker on the site which tells you want you can get at a location but not where you need to be to get the top speed.
I tried quite hard, the online chat person didn't know - I had to explain the question several times as he kept on saying "just type your postcode into the box", and eventually he gave me a number to call where I was on hold for half an hour before the person who answered said there was no way to get the information I was after.
Simon
How about asking their PR dept? isn't that (300mbps) something they would be shouting from the rooftops? Unless they are afraid that everyone will soon start demanding.
Failing that, buy a single share in BT and ask about it at the AGM.
If you check the Rightmove site you will notice that they have a handy broadband checker so you can look this up. Works for rented and sale properties. First thing I look at, no broadband - no sale.....
Now if only BT were honest about broadband availability - it seems that a large part of the country has broadband "...coming in August 2014...."
Yep, another vote for rightmove.co.uk, a link to a broadband checker is on their property information page. You sometimes have to read between the lines and confirm with the exchange checker on samknows, but if it gives a speed under 10Mb/s and says fibre isn't available it's probably right.
These days, road links nearby are of middling value, when they are constantly hosed with traffic at the best of times.
The ability to talk and log in with VPN remotely is important.
In my previous job - which was only 12 miles away from my house - I often couldn't get to work unimpeded unless I left at around 6.00 - 6.30AM. That makes for a very long day when your hours are not flexible.
However, if one's employer are open to working on VPN from home until such time the end-of-days traffic has passed, then - well, it just makes the day a lot more pleasant. It's nice to clear one's email uninterrupted and actually get on with something when you do make it to the office.
Same goes for risking life and limb in horrendous weather - suddenly living near the exchange seems like a smart move (literally).
I have to admit when moving house I'd want to be within 500 metres of an enabled FTTC cabinet. 300 or less for preference. But mobile coverage - meh. Adequate to make and receive texts and calls if I'm lucky but it's not a deal breaker. I lived without a mobile for 30 years and I don't make many calls on it even now.
As long as there is some kind of broadband available that doesn't cost a fortune, what's the big deal? Oh, phone calls. Well, there's a bunch of alternatives for that, including the aforementioned femtocell. But don't most people switch their devices to wi-fi when they're home anyway for data use? I live near a river where there are no towers on once side of me at all. I typically get a 3G signal of limited strength at home... and it matters not at all to me. I can still use the phone with the signal I get, and wi-fi for data. My tablets don't even have a cellular connection. No available broadband or unreliable broadband--well, that could be a deal breaker for me, much more so than cellular.
When I was younger I picked my first apartment partially due to proximity to a decent local bar. But those were the days before cell phones were common.
A lot - if not most - of new households that are formed don't take a fixed line service for broadband or telephone. They use their mobiles for everything. It's one of the things that ruins the economics for Virgin or BT to roll out more super whizzy stuff - fewer potential customers year on year. I guess that's why the BT adverts show student age people, to increase takeup and justify more rollouts, that demographic has to be more inclined to buy fixed line services.
Surely the only place a person doesn't need a "mobile" signal is at home, where people can have other more less mobile but permanent connectivity via the likes of VDSL and connectivity with VoIP / Facebook / Twitter via good old IP?
Even a twisted copper pair was pretty good a making and receiving calls, and even stretches into the great outdoors.
It says lots for the awareness of the subjects in the survey, will they move when the coverage changes?
A case in point being EE as mentioned in this esteemed organ degrading their 3g network in favour of 4G idiots with tartphones to watch films and other ephemera, leaving those who need a phone for biz calls screwed.
An awful lot of engineers plumped for Orange because they were on a par with Vodaphone country wide but inside the M25 they ruled in 2000 when i got my first mobile. I nearly made the mistake of gettting a fibre to cab internet, and killing the BT landline as I had perfect reception at home and only on the odd upgrade sunday had to wait to get a call connection
When Orange merged with T-mobile, for the first time there was network congestion, call drops, 3 months later back to solid signal.
Then as 4G was rolled out calls cut off, and at home watching the phone declare T-mobile, Orange, EE or flipping, but good or full signal displayed most of time and network unavailable emergency calls only? I voted with my feet as have most tech EE victims including those on networks hosted like Virgin
.They do not know the level of enmity they have provoked by rubbing salt in the wounds with the expensive 4G ads, the money for which could have been used to keep 3G coverage usable.
So beware.
I managed to extract a femtocell from Three last week, free - bizarrely, they refuse to sell them and apparently also refuse to activate second hand ones bought on eBay. However, you can't set them as "open" - what I really want is that any Three handset can transfer calls and texts over it (but not data).
(Better still, if they'd agree "roaming" so we could still a single £100 femtocell in the office for everyone to use, whether they're on Three, Vodafone, O2... I can imagine a lot of pubs/restaurants being happy to do that too, the same way they do with Wifi.)
Having to stand on the parent's bed, in the front bedroom, to be able to hold a mobile phone conversation using the Nokia Orange. That pretty much guaranteed a good conversation. The phone would ring pretty much anywhere in the house, but receiving the call meant a sprint upstairs before divert to voicemail. How expectations change :).
I still have that situation: my work phone, on the No-2 Notwork, will ring whilst I am at my SOHO desk, but to get satisfactory call quality I have to run upstairs to the bedroom to answer it.
Result: being rather to the left on the fat--fit spectrum, when I'm working at home, I'm always out of breath when I answer my phone. Then they ask me to look at a mail they've sent me and I say "oh, my laptop's downstairs, let me run down and get it ..."
I wonder what my clients / colleagues / boss must think.
. . . John
"Their findings show that 45 per cent of 18- to 35-year-olds rank mobile as the most important consideration when buying a new property,"
So the fact the new place is an absolute shithole, run by a slumlord who's also the district drug dealer, in the middle of the city's drug district, falls a distant second place to cell coverage?
At least if there's the slim chance the phone coverage doesn't work, their dealer is just upstairs.
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