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I don’t often have a moan, but today’s an exception. The Platt family and I have decamped to Tilford in Surrey for a few days (for reasons I’ll explain in a blog another time). Leafy Surrey, part of the stockbroker belt, within easy reach of London and part of the affluent South-East is somewhere you’d expect to have excellent wifi and mobile phone coverage, wouldn’t you? The opposite is true. It’s universally crap.
The house where we’re staying is in a mobile phone blackspot. I’m on O2 and can get a signal much of the time. My wife and her parents are on EE and their phones are useless. They can’t get anything. It’s the same story a few miles up the road at my wife’s brothers, only there I can’t get a phone signal either!
As for wifi, what a joke. I’m currently sat in the Barley Mow pub in Tilford, trying to upload pictures to my website, but I might as well be in the Outer Hebrides. The wifi can’t cope. I only came here because I couldn’t upload them at the family home (the signal kept dropping out). It’s not just Tilford either. I’d tried to upload pictures using the wifi in a pub in Farnham earlier. I managed one picture at a time before I lost the connection.
No wonder Britain is becoming a bit of an international joke for the quality of its infrastructure. If I can’t get a decent ‘phone & wifi connection in Surrey for Chrissake! The irony is that back in West Yorkshire I have an excellent communications network and my Virgin wifi is blinding. The upshot is that I couldn’t live here and do my job. Things are better than here in the Far North of Scotland. I’ve travelled by train from Inverness to Wick on a wifi fitted train. I can’t do that here in Surrey either!
Someone, somewhere needs to get a grip…
By scrapping HS2, the freed up money could be used to improve broadband technologies in rural areas. I’m sure you agree that funding digital infrastructure such as that you complain about is more important than spending £40bn on London Euston’s new line.
You’re a typical binary thinker. Everything is either/or. Reality is very different. We need both. We cannot move growing numbers of rail passengers down an internet cable once the existing rail lines run out of capacity (as they are doing now). No can we move the goods that people by over the internet through the internet.
The fact is, tech has never reduced rail travel, and scrapping Hs2 to invest in broadband would be stupid. As for the ridiculous assertion that HS2’s London’s new railway, tell that to the people in Leeds, Manchester & Birmingham who’ll benefit from both the regeneration Hs2 is kick-starting, and the capacity released on the existing network for new local service.