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How London cracked mobile phone coverage on the Underground

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Re: How London cracked mobile phone coverage on the Underground

#121

Post by exikyut »

userbinator wrote: post #70
dgxyz wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are also some absolute morons out there. Couple of local things around me... First I went to one of the local town planning meetings in my area when they were rolling out FTTC. This one was due to a rather old person objecting to the placement of a streetside box which was not even outside her property and no one who it would have affected could see it or cared about it. I raised my objections about her being a…

Second, they built a 5g mast put didn't put any equipment in it and left it 3 months. Several local threads on Facebook from the tweakers about how it was causing all sorts of completely unrelated problems from tinnitus to covid to mind control. Then someone burned it. There is still no equipment in the cabinet or mast today, nearly 4 years on. No one got 5g. Reminds me of this infamous decade-old story: https://web.…

I wonder what that group of people would have made of https://youtu.be/zy_ctHNLan8

(Chaotic lawfully :D)

Re: How London cracked mobile phone coverage on the Underground

#122

Post by signal11 »

dgxyz wrote: post #61
saulr wrote: post #37

Just to add a piece of data to support this: > It turns out the phone signal inside the station can be better than the one above ground I was surprised when I noticed I had 5G in the tunnel, ran a speed test and hit 641Mbps down! https://www.speedtest.net/result/i/6831252952

That always hurts. I live in a particularly nice bit of London and there is virtually no mobile phone service other than voice and can only get 80 meg ADSL. Yet the mole people get better service. Grr.

Is it practical to pay BT or HyperOptic to run fibre to you? If enough households commit to a contract they’ll sometimes do it for free.

Re: How London cracked mobile phone coverage on the Underground

#123

Post by alexfoo »

FridayoLeary wrote: post #104
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a small surface building that doesn't look like a station, platforms are visible if you're paying attention, and it can be used for emergency evacuations.

what's the address of the building?

https://maps.app.goo.gl/YpywKrJC4at2RwHy7

I found the coordinates on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_End_tube_station (the link is up in the top right above the photo).

Doesn't appear on this list though (unless it had another name): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_former_and_unopened_Lo...

Re: How London cracked mobile phone coverage on the Underground

#124

Post by bobmcnamara »

joelkoen wrote: post #108

> What happens if a train has to stop in the middle of the tunnel, and you phone for help? [...] the system has been deliberately configured to transmit the location of the nearest tube station, where access can be arranged. That’s why sometimes you might check your smartphone map, and it will display the “wrong” location, because that’s the best one for a 999 call to use. This doesn't seem correct - cell towers don'…

> This doesn't seem correct - cell towers don't just transmit a location that phones then pickup and use?

I think it works like this: Towers transmit location. If the phone has no other source of location data, it'll fall back to "probably within radio range of this only tower I can hear"

Re: How London cracked mobile phone coverage on the Underground

#125

Post by alexfoo »

KellyCriterion wrote: post #111
saulr wrote: post #37

Just to add a piece of data to support this: > It turns out the phone signal inside the station can be better than the one above ground I was surprised when I noticed I had 5G in the tunnel, ran a speed test and hit 641Mbps down! https://www.speedtest.net/result/i/6831252952

Great - what does customers do with 640 Mbps downstream in the metro then? :-D :-D

Take their laptops and do any big bulky downloads/uploads they have queued up.

Re: How London cracked mobile phone coverage on the Underground

#126

Post by chatmasta »

cagz wrote: post #44

I use the underground frequently. It doesn't really feel like half of it is covered. Where it is available, it works amazingly. I might have been using the other half by sheer luck.

I find it works pretty well, at least that I’m consistently surprised I have any signal at all. Sometimes I need to disable private relay to get it to work with all the switchovers. There’s also frequent swapping between the 5G signal and the Wi-Fi that comes auto-enabled on my phone by my carrier who provides a client certificate entitling me to it.

I’m not sure about the privacy implications of this whole setup. It’s basically turned the underground into a surveillance dragnet that can hoover up all sorts of interesting metadata… hostnames, hardware identifiers, traveling patterns, DNS queries, SNI requests… and an untold amount of unencrypted communications across weird protocols and devices..

Re: How London cracked mobile phone coverage on the Underground

#127

Post by traceroute66 »

dgxyz wrote: post #86
ljm wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the opposite problem where I can only get HyperOptic. Not even OpenReach stuff. No problem with bandwidth but zero price competition, and 5G broadband isn’t viable either. Going from £70/mo for gigabit to £65/mo for 500mb is insulting.

Urgh hyperoptic is dog shit as well. CGNAT or pay extra on top of already insulting prices.

> Urgh hyperoptic is dog shit as well

Sounds like they haven't changed !

I recall helping out a friend to review a Hyperoptic proposal for their development.

Hyperoptic's idea of "optic" was fibre to a switch in the basement and then unshielded CAT5e to the users premises.

If that wasn't bad enough, even to the untrained eye, you did not need a measuring tape to see they would have exceeded the CAT length limit by quite some margin for many of the users.

And that's before their claims of owning the external fibre when in reality they were just contracting an ethernet service from BT.

So yeah, I would not touch Hyperoptic with a bargepole. I suspect the other altnets are no better .... "sell, build, disappear off to the sunset" was the impression I got.

Reading some of the reviews on the internet about post-sales support I'm not surprised in the slightest that users often struggle to get support once the salesdroid has long departed their doorstep.

Re: How London cracked mobile phone coverage on the Underground

#128

Post by alexfoo »

tialaramex wrote: post #106
ljm wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the opposite problem where I can only get HyperOptic. Not even OpenReach stuff. No problem with bandwidth but zero price competition, and 5G broadband isn’t viable either. Going from £70/mo for gigabit to £65/mo for 500mb is insulting.

Wait, why can't you get Openreach ? Even if it was a new build by idiots who forgot to push the "Free fibre, yes please" button when breaking ground you should have DSL at least.

As a generalisation: OpenReach prioritise areas that have no fibre.

If Hyperoptic (or someone else like Community Fibre or The 4th Utility, etc) are in an area then OpenReach will put that area nearer to the bottom of their todo list.

It's better if they concentrate on putting fibre into areas that still have 7Mbps wet string DSL than competing in an area that already has one or more Gbps fibre options.

Even then, OpenReach tend to do FTTC first. Then it's case of what the last mile is formed of:

If it's via telephone poles then they get the fibre concentrators installed on the poles (which involves digging up the roads to get fibre to the poles) and then they're ready for the individual fibre runs to each property as and when they want to be connected.

You can see the differences in Google Streetview images in a residential road like: https://maps.app.goo.gl/RK8J8TXZUY6iF3pTA where the the June 2024 images show the fibre concentrators at the top of the pole, and then going back to the 2015 images or before where they aren't present.

If the last mile is underground then the fibre concentrators have to be installed in the service ducts (it's easier for them to deploy fibre alongside their existing copper pairs) and the last 5-50 yards to the actual premises is an absolute lottery, especially as many house redevelopments bury existing underground cables under concrete and other structures and twist/kink things in a way that copper is fine to deal with but there's little chance you can run anything else through whatever conduit is there, let alone something without corners too tight for fibre.

Compare the above overhead wiring fun with a street such as: https://maps.app.goo.gl/oDchjxtaoxPD5Pe86 where there are no telephone poles.

Re: How London cracked mobile phone coverage on the Underground

#129

Post by edent »

redleader55 wrote: post #112
edent wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Paris metro is mostly cut-and-cover. It isn't very deep. The deepest tube lines are around 60m underground.

Are you suggesting the mobile signal comes from above the ground in Paris?

No. I'm suggesting it is easier and cheaper to retrofit equipment. Not to mention dealing with the extra heat.

Re: How London cracked mobile phone coverage on the Underground

#130

Post by gorfian_robot »

master-lincoln wrote: post #117
youngtaff wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ten of so years ago I was on a train and the women opposite me gave all her credit card details to someone over the phone — anyone close by could have had fun with them

Is that still a thing in the USA that you can buy with just a credit card number, validity date, name and 3 digit code? In the EU we have psd2 mandating a second factor. Usually an app where the transaction has to be confirmed.

Yep. the US has always been behind on this bc both the card companies and the merchants are loath to spend an extra .01% to implement better security.

Apple Pay on mac is the best we got. Looking forward to getting a new mac this year in part just for that.

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