I will never again sign a contract with a mobile phone network beyond one month in duration. Ever. It’s insanity. People are signing up for eighteen-month or two year mobile contracts left right and centre, when they’re little more than loans on the latest shiny new phone – never mind the fact that the network might be completely hopeless. You may well get home or back to your office with your iPhone 4 or HTC Desire only to realise that the only way you can ever use it to text, download or (weird, I know) actually make telephone calls is to go outside, possibly to the roof, because your network has a black hole the size of a football field in the one place where you’re sitting for most of your waking hours. The lunacy of people having to sue mobile networks because their coverage just isn’t fit for purpose… it’s… well, lunacy. Never mind, you can play Angry Birds or something with all that time you can’t actually talk to people.
A short while ago I decided not to be trapped any more. I bought the phone I wanted, and over the last six months I have moved between the four main networks trying them all out to find the one that gave me halfway decent data and voice coverage at my desk, decent voice coverage at home, and maybe even some coverage on the commute between. Starting with T-Mobile (useless), I moved to O2 and found them OK for a while, but web access at my desk was patchy, so I left O2 for Vodafone. This turned out to be a huge mistake – Vodafone’s 3G coverage was dire in my office, and voice calls sounded like they were being made through a vat of washing up liquid. So I tried Orange, and found that while coverage appeared to be OK and the 3G symbol lit up on my phone, the actual speed of downloads was pathetic. So I’m back to @O2 and, having moved desks, am happily streaming music on @Spotify.
I’m not recommending O2 above the other networks at all – I’m recommending them for me, sat in this specific chair in the office, living where I do, travelling where I do. That’s all. And if I move desk or move house and they turn out to be useless, I’ll sack them off for whichever network suits that desk or that house. And that’s the beauty of not committing yourself to months on end, which I will never do again. If you want that handset so much, just buy it, and if enough people free themselves from absurd long-term contracts and just walk away from crappy network operators, maybe just maybe they’ll up their game.
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