Posts by kevjs 64 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Jul 2009
T-Mobile already do that - Twitter is blocked as I found out when our SDSL connection went down and I tried to find out if anyone else had issues... And in the past I have found a page on our website listing Essex Steet, Hull and another address in Scunthorpe also caused the page filter to kick in - argh!
Fortunately on personal contracts you can unlock from the My T-Mobile website.
They did - 050 IIRC, but no one liked it.
VOIP is good when you have an office in a certain area, and the boss elsewhere - you can all be inside the local PBAX and have the same outgoing number...
Anyway, local area codes don't really work anyway, especially when part of the urban area is classed as being in a different town, you end up with local radio needing to include the numbers in full anyway.
120,000 town - bah, that's nothing - try working in the centre of a 666,000 population city (Nottingham) and getting 1 bar of 3G signal on a good day - can't wait to be able to access the Orange 3G network (assuming they have got the data sides of things working in the seven years since I was last a customer).
And as for "I left Orange for T-Mobile a few years back due to a combination of awful customer support (i.e. they basically had none, where as T-Mobile were quite open in comparison)" me too - I have found T-Mobile Customer Service to be second to none since (so much so I haven't even felt the need to give the other operators a look when upgrades come) - and while I might not have a signal all the time, when I do get one it actually works without fail. I really hope that the good bits of T-Mobile are kept and coupled with Orange's superior coverage.
Except it doesn't really save 17% does it?
Some of the time it's on for a reason, and lets face it most of the time people turn the lights off when they go to bed - lets assume therefore that it's on a more realistic 17:00 - 23:00 every day of the year (possibly longer in winter, especially at weekends, and less in summer) - that takes you to the equivalent of leaving a 10 watt bulb on all day giving you a much more realistic total of 3%.
But then again you can't buy "normal" light bulbs in most retailers any-more, so it's probably an 11watt CFC bulb, so 1.84watts an hour equivalent which about 0.5% of the annual total - some of which it's probably being useful.
Assuming this is in somewhere like a lounge where you might be in for 3.5 hours of the evening turning it off for the thirty minutes you are out the room would save you about 0.1% of your average total - i.e. 1.8kWh, or running that 2kw fan heater just under an hour to heat your room up in winter because it's a bit parky.
According to EDF that is 21p here in the East Midlands - I dare say that saving is completely erased by having to buy a new bulb prematurely as the constant power cycling has caused it to fail - and I imagine the energy used in producing it is more than the energy I as an individual have saved.
And this is what the article set out to prove!
I wonder if BT will ever provide a line rental only line?
I don't want one of your pathetic bundles as I don't even home a landline phone, I only need the pay you so I can have my ADSL connection placed on the line - stop trying to say I can avoid the price increases by buying a bundle - it will cost me more for no gain...
I wish T-Mobile would launch one on there network - I live in one of our core cities urban areas (i.e. Nottingham) and get just enough signal indoors for the phone to ring, but not enough to maintain a conversation, and standing outside in the cold and wet to make a voice call is not fun! (and switching to another network is not an option - only T-Mobile and Three appear on a network scan, but all the networks appear when in the garden - T-Mobile annoyingly with 5bars and HSDPA!)
Being inside Nottingham's urban area means I get decent ASDL coverage (18mbps from Be*) though so could easily use that for piggy backing on - Indeed I conserve the battery life on the phone by using WiFi and letting the RSS, Podcasts, and ActiveSync connections run over Wifi!
Not that Wifi is a brilliant solution as coverage inside is rather patchy.
Then again, perhaps a Femtocell with the ability to connect to an external UMTS aerial would be a better solution for many on the edge of network coverage! (i.e. uses the Mobile network rather than ADSL)
A few years ago I switched from Orange's abysmal network and customer services on my personal mobile, and later recommended a similar (and very successful) switch at work - now it looks like I'll be moving back :o(
While Orange and their network was a big pile of steaming mess; T-Mobile have been nothing but helpful and have been able to provide a network that works (when you have a signal - their only problem - at least having a signal means a working connection unlike Orange) - the people I feel sorry for are the polite and helpful folks in T-Mobile's CS.
Let us hope and pray that T-Mobile staffers are the ones that do the day to day running of the network and customer services - if it's left to Orange we'll be doomed....
12 months of my contract to go, hopefully that will give me enough idea of whether the network is heading to the dogs are not, without it become a big pile of plop.
@Mad as a Bat - in my experience the C905 signal meter means diddley squat - often it's displaying zero bars, but paired with an "H" and the web browsing and phone calls work just fine - yet anything less that two bars on GSM and it's unusable.
Seams to hold connection to the network well (gets just about usable signal in the lounge unlike any other Sony Ericsson/Sony handset I have had - and unlike my housemate's Nokia) - certainly enough to answer the phone and walk into the garden! (Mind you if it wasn't for the local NIMBY's that wouldn't be a concern.)
Since they foisted the stupid card reader thingy onto me I have never been able to log in properly anyway - always rejects the code and I have to use the override mechanism (and what is the point in the stupid plastic calculator where the numbers were off showing the 4 digits in your PIN when you can override it anyway)
Much quicker to walk to the new fangled ATM's that are finally able to do what the TSB ones could do back in the 1990s (i.e. print statements) and which can also transfer money between accounts (can't give you cash mind).
What teenager doesn't get a new SIM every few weeks anyway.... Used to get a text along the lines of "My new number is 07xxx xxx xxx" every few days when I was younger! Or even better - One2One sim is out of credit use my Orange number..... (ah, those were the days, when off-net meant somet)
Anonymous Coward - "surely 1/3 of the entire population of planet earth" - if most networks around the world behave like Orange (SIM tied to phone, buy a new phone have to use a new SIM) then that may be possible - unlike 02 and T-Mobile where you keep the same SIM for years and years (I wonder how many of their customer have Cellnet and One2One SIMs?).
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