Ben's Talk3G Blog

It was quite nice to read this morning that somebody has successfully taken their mobile operator to court and, as a result, had their contract terminated and been paid some form of compensatory amount due to lack of usable mobile network coverage.

Unfortunately, this is also a perfect reflection of the arrogance of our mobile operators in the UK, who believe they can act with impunity. To think that Orange UK had the audacity to hold a customer to a lengthy contract when they were unable to provide the service to them that they were paying for is, in my mind, completely disgusting. It's certainly no way to treat a customer - and it's a despicable misuse of airtime contracts.

GSM is so established now that there's no excuse for any UK network to have coverage black-spots of any business or residential address. I firmly believe this. If I had things my way, the GSM license holders would have been forced to blanket the entire geographic area of the UK by now, so for their sake it's probably fortunate that I hold no such position of power. I'm not saying that there shouldn't be compromises to achieve it, like network sharing, just that there's the money and the technology to reasonably achieve it.

Moving to 3G is a bit of a dilemma. I've always liked the idea of doing away with GSM in favour of WCDMA/UMTS and so remain frustrated that, while there's hope, there's still no clarification on the usage of 900MHz and 1800MHz spectrum for the technology. Getting rid of GSM may seem a little wasteful and hasty, but it's becoming highly irrelevant in our digital world and I, like those who lead the Apple faith, firmly believe that backwards compatibility and legacy support should not come at the expense of innovation and progression. In other words, it's time to get our skates on - what the bloody hell are we waiting for.

Prison Break struck a chord with me yesterday (watching on AppleTV, of course). So much technology is out there that we're not enjoying for so many reasons. Patents and profits being the big two - a) limited supply = increased value, so patents make things artificially expensive and b) product life cycles are carefully planned to maximise profit and ensure a product is not superseded before sales have dropped off, leaving great new tech sitting on the shelf that we should be embracing now.

Bad business with a smattering of bad government. Go figure.