General Chat

The decision I make today may not be the decision I make tomorrow.

Yet.

Those mobile users living in the area of Kent that Shirley’s daughter does have to be very careful now that free roaming is ending. One’s mobile signal can easily be picked up by masts in France.

Mr Owl had a landline phone until last year but it was only used for the answering machine. Mr Owl was a building inspector with the National House Building Council or NHBC. Site managers had to phone up and book him in to check various stages of the new builds. The NHBC underwrite themselves so to help minimise the chance of a massive payout they send people in people like Mr Owl to check the build. Mr Owl still works in construction but no longer for the NHBC. We do have fibre here but we live in a city and the winds here at worst don’t usually hit more than 50mph. The joke here is that for 9 months of the year it’s 12 degrees and raining and for three months of the year 1 degree above and dry. Mobiles for the most part do work but even here we have black spots. The telephone pole that sits in the middle dividing four gardens including ours dates from the 1940s and the area has changed massively since then.

Our daughter has awful broadband connection

Even their mobiles get limited connections at times

They have bought all the booster equipment they can but still get trouble

She lives near Folkestone

They are going to switch over to fibre soon and stop having a home phone as they rarely use it

Never notice your slip up Caroline tbh....dont worry about it. But good for you admitting your mistake.

My apologies for the slip-up.....see it's easy to admit you typed something wrong isn't it shame others don't ever do it.....

What I know is that when there's a power outage I lose my cell phone coverage and I have a backup generator for my home.

Yes Names absolutely agree with you. Many of the same homes are again without power in Aberdeenshire & surrounding areas. My heart goes out to all of them as if one storm wasnt enough.

Yes those people should try to manage for a week in a cold house with no lights or heat. My son was 4 months only in Dec 1995,we had no power for 4 days.wrapped him up in a carrycot on the sofa whilst I slept on a blanket on the floor infront of a coal fire...well didnt sleep as had to keep one eye open on the fire incase it spat out anything! Was no joke and didnt even get any compensation whatsoever!

Had to boil a pan of water on the grate to make up bottles of milk.

Florence in the hebrides

The problems encountered by rural communities with their fancy new digital phones during Storm Arwen seem not to have made any difference to those planning to get rid of the landlines. Presumably they all live in nice warm homes and have never had to deal with prolonged power loss.

Thankfully my power has managed to stay on with the storm but 20 miles further south they are without power and many others in the southern isles.

When the electric is off and the elderly alarms wont work, do you know that night carers and others drive round villages all night checking on the most vulnerable incase someone has fallen in their house? That is the system we have in place here, good old fashioned systems which never fail!

It's also a large area and when power goes, its usually a main network and many villages and hundreds affected not just one village. That means there are no other masts to get a mobile signal off as the whole area will be down. It only reached about 60-70 mph here so not too bad considering. But its still a gale here and that will hinder the engineers repairing the faults as not all cables are underground.

Florence in the hebrides

Who did say that cellphone masts use Wi-Fi?

Quite a few areas in mainland England still don't have the internet, or a decent internet.
Shame they're ignored, isn't it?

And when Openreach are stumped by 'normal' connections, goodness knows how they'll cope with something new.

They took at least 5 visits before they worked out how to connect me.
They even tried connecting me to a SKY plug that was here - which isn't the internet - it was a TV connection.

It's all very well having backup power at your home but not much use when locally the whole area is out and therefore so is the wifi signal for the area.

All the options need power somewhere. Mobiles are no use if the tower has gone down.

For many people who ‘keep up when younger’ are quite likely to find that technologies outstrip their abilities as they get older and mentally frailer.

This, of course, won’t affect the ‘font’. ;-)

CornishSusie - Cob walls - may partly explain why my brother's phone doesn't work.
He lives in an old Smithy, with very thick walls.

Don't forget peeps - the 'font' reckons it's all our fault technology is cr*p - nothing to do with, say BT initially giving my brother the wrong phone - you NEED the phone with YOUR number, not some random one the idiot picked up before he left.

Nothing to do with Open Reach not knowing what in hell they're doing.
First they need to dig up the road, then put in more poles, oh no, give us some more money - we've got it wrong.
'Get stuffed' said sister - who was the intermediatory.

Sister had to intervene as BT were confused when they couldn't contact my brother by phone - that's true - BT 'couldn't work out why, my brother, who was waiting for a phone connection, couldn't be contacted by phone, But, apparently, it's OUR fault! :-D :-D :-D :-D

If this is the standard of 'those in the know', there's not much hope.

No need to contact any company or whatever when we have our own "font of all knowledge" on here.

Whattsapp calls are useless here and always freeze and cut off! i have unlimited calls on mobile and landline anyway.keep up when younger! I am not old RTR but not all areas are suitable for the latest technology .I am very comp literate and have a mobile, tablet, laptop. Its not lack of knowledge but the infrastructure to make these things work properly.

So my poor mother who is 85 and has no clue about the internet,mobile etc will be completely cut off when her landline goes. Are people of that age supposed to be keeping up with technology?

Florence in the hebrides

Well how canny. My local news web site has just given out a storm 10 warning for later on and says that this may cause power cuts and cut off mobile coverage!
I rest my case

Florence in the hebrides
Edit: if i dont come back on later, you will know why. Off to fill a flask now!

Yes LondonBelle, its called Digital Voice. I was just browsing on the internet news items when i saw the article.

Yes RTR when the power goes off, mobiles work for around 45 mins. Up here in the islands, the power goes off for hours and mobiles are useless! Even with power my internet when its windy like today goes on and off.

So what about older people with care lines then?
An 80 year old is not likely to have a mobile or internet, my mother wouldnt understand how to even use a mobile.

It cannot be one size fits all as there are far too many areas where internet and mobile signal will never be good enough to reply on!

Florence in the hebrides

BT 'talked ' us into changing to internet phones - the engineer arrived, switched on his phone and said to forget it - not a hope in hell of it working as we are out in the wilds of Cornwall and our cottage has 3ft thick cob walls. We have to go to the end of the garden to get a very patchy mobile signal and did tell BT that.
He added that he is spending most of his time now trying to reconnect people who have been convinced to try it by fast talking operatives in London who have no concept of what it is like to live elsewhere. Although we were obviously never transferred it took a week of phone calls to BT to untangle everything and get us back on our old tariff.