Hey BT, improve your coverage first, then we'll talk about perfect 4G

Digsby

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Did you get excited about BT Mobile this week? I didn't. I live in a special part of the UK known as "The Countryside" where you're lucky if you have any mobile signal at all, let alone a 4G mast of ultimate power.
It's funny living in The Countryside. It's like you're actually living in a make believe nation where everything is worse and no one cares about you, similar to Borat's downtrodden portrayal of rural Kazakhstan.
My phone just says "G" when it's not on Wi-Fi. Here, in The Countryside, that's what we consider lucky. It means, if I'm really, really bored and hiding from the rain in the right cave, I can pass the time by seeing if I can load any pages of the internet before receiving a timeout error.
Connected mobile services just don't work in The Countryside. Google didn't really allow for people using 3k a second mobile data connections in 2015 when it put together Keep, Google Now, the voice-to-text system or most of the fun things people who live in The Big Towns take for granted.
The BT Mobile announcement didn't mention what happens when you sign up but then don't get a signal because of where you live. Presumably the small print says you can keep the micro-SIM to use as a coaster for a Lego minifig to put his pretend cup of tea on, because playing with Lego is often all you can do for fun in The Countryside.

Downwardly mobile

Actually, the small print on BT's page says: "4G speeds vary by location, coverage and demand," which is handy to know.
That's like a broadband company promising an "up to" connection speed of 24Mbps, before everyone on your street starts streaming Top Gear simultaneously and the actual connection plummets to a data transfer rate roughly equivalent to morse code.
It's another case of BT being allowed to cherry-pick the profitable parts of the country and ignore people who live in fields down dirt tracks, who were last visited by a BT engineer in the 1950s.
The good news for me and BT is that, thanks to it not being cost effective to wire up anyone to fibre and even Richard Branson himself not having enough money to pay Virgin to hook up buildings in fields, I'm still on BT Broadband.

Definitely no 3G here

The exchange hasn't been unbundled because no one's even sure where it is any more. It might be that shed by the river, or the collapsed brick thing around the back of the school that they grow sunflowers in now. So at least I can get a non-working BT Mobile SIM for the cheaper price.
Not that there's any point. If there's some sort of emergency and I have to go to a city, 3G is amazing enough for me. When you've been on one G for six years, having a mobile phone that actually works as advertised without having to beg for a stranger's Wi-Fi password is incredible.
Maps suddenly work, for example, which is useful as cities often have more than one road and upwards of 20 houses lumped together in one big building all with the same front door, and can therefore get a bit confusing to countrysiders.
Problem is, a visit to The City usually means coming home to a massive data bill shock, as, seeing as we can't use it here, most people opt for the bare minimum data allowance to get them through. Like, for example, BT Mobile's useless 500MB limit, that'll last a City Person about 45 minutes on iPlayer.
Even two nights of looking at Google Maps and the 1990s web sites of local tourist attractions in a B&B over 3G can sail you through your allowance, leaving you to return back to The Countryside with a £60 data bill.
The thing is, it's actually all quite good.
When you go for a walk, you really go for a walk. You may as well leave your phone at home charging when you are in The Countryside, as there's not much point carrying an internet-enabled supercomputer around with you when there's no internet.
If there's a good rainbow I can run home and get my proper camera. When you're not staring at your phone counting bars and cursing the constant switches between HSDPA and HSDPA+, you get to look at the trees and things. It's like... relaxing. Instead of Twitter making you angry, bees and things can make you happy.
So maybe I will get one of those BT Mobile SIMs. No one phones me anyway, so I may as well pay £5 a month for nothing to ever happen on my phone rather than £10.