Martin to Base Station (The Odyssey Part 2)

During my recent dealings with Three Mobile in search of a better signal it occurred to me that I've never seen a mobile phone base station or mast in or around Fair Oak. This probably means one or the other of two things: 1) I've seen plenty of them, but not realised what they are or 2) They're generally in out-of-the-way places I don't tend to go. Feeling in an inquisitive frame of mind, I determined to find out where the nearest base stations to home are located.

My starting point was Google, which turned up Ofcom's Site Finder - an online utility that allows you to enter a postcode, town or street name and displays the nearest base stations on a map. You can then click on each base station to reveal details - such as operator, type and frequency range - about each base station. The site is a bit old fashioned and clunky, but it revealed the following result:



The blue triangles in top left quadrant of the map are mobile phone base stations, the furthest right of which is apparently Three Mobile's 18-metre tall, UTMS macrocell transmitter operating at 2100 Mhz.

Switching to Google Maps, the calculated distance between home and the base station is about a mile if following the directions given, or half-a-mile as the crow flies. Odd, then, that the signal should be so weak at home.

Zooming in on the approximate location of the base station was not as revealing as I'd hoped. Instead of seeing the base station clearly defined, all that was visible were trees, fields and buildings:


View Larger Map

Although disappointing, this was not altogether unexpected. As readers may be aware, Google use several different sources for images depending on the level of zoom. Images at this resolution are generally taken from aerial photography which, given the expense, may not be updated very often, so the image could well pre-date the building of the base station. It might also be the case that the footprint of a base station is so small that it isn't readily identifiable from an aerial photograph.

What was more surprising was switching to Google's street view. A ~20 metre tall mast should tower over the surrounding landscape, a cluster of 5-6 of them, as shown on Ofcom's map, more so. So why, then, did street view show nothing more than houses, fields and trees?


View Larger Map

Something was definitely up, and it didn't seem to be mobile phone masts! Was Ofcom's map wrong? Was Google out of date? Had alien invaders stolen them and left a message "All your base are belong to us" in their place? The internet having only got me so far there was nothing for it but to dress up warm, stock up on provisions and venture into Deepest Darkest Fair Oak.

In search of a better signal (The Odyssey Part 1)

Since upgrading my mobile phone to HTC's (utterly fabulous) Desire HD I've hit a minor snag: Three's data and voice coverage seems to be patchy at best in and around Fair Oak. In the five+ years I've been with Three this has never been much of a problem, so much so that I've never really noticed.

Although it seemed unlikely, given that in other places both voice and data signal was good, I wondered if this might be a problem with the handset. Three's post code search function certainly suggested that signal strength should be pretty good in Fair Oak so I registered a complaint on www.three.co.uk.

Within 12 hours I received an email from Three suggesting a couple of steps that might help. These amounted to little more than turning the phone off and then back on again, which needless to say did not fix the problem. So I filed another complaint, including the previous reference number and the results of Three's so called fault finding steps.

Two days later I received a call from Three's Customer Service department. I get to talk to India a fair amount during my day job and it's often a bit hit and miss as to a) whether you'll be able to understand the person on the other end of the phone, b) whether the person on the other end of the phone will be able to understand you and c) whether or not they'll actually do anything to help. Fortunately for me Three seem to have spent some time and effort training their people as the woman I spoke to was both easy to understand and helpful. She came to the conclusion that it probably wasn't the handset at fault and would I like to talk to Network Support? I confirmed I would and she attempted to put me through, but unfortunately the line was busy so she would arrange for them to call me.

The next day India called again - it was the Network Support team who confirmed that the low signal strength was due to a network coverage issue and would not be resolved until Three installed a new base station. I asked if there was anything I could do to escalate the call, and the chap on the end of the line said that Three were usually very quick to resolve these sorts of problems. I asked again if I could do anything to escalate the matter, and was put through to the Network Support manager. He also assured me that Three are very quick to resolve such matters and that he'd personally package up the call and pass it to the correct department. I've been fobbed off like this before, so I asked again if there was anything I could do to escalate the matter and so he gave me the URL of the complaints department and a call reference.

A day or so after filling in the complaint form with an explanation of the problem and the complete call history I received an email from Three's Customer Complaints department. This basically stated that although no dates have been confirmed, a new base station is due to be installed which should significantly boost signal in the area. We'll see. It's possible - and indeed highly likely - that I've been the victim of another corporate fob-off, but you never know.