[saulr]

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

[dgxyz]

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.

[MagnumOpus]

One might even suspect that the particularly nice parts of London are full of NIMBYs who successfully petition against the eyesore of mobile masts being put up…

(Circumstantial evidence is that a particularly extra nice part of central London has no tube station, ostensibly to keep the riff-raff out, and is the only area with a proposed station on Crossrail 2 that voted against having a new station!)

[ljm]

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.

[zipy124]

I almost moved into a nice warehouse space in farringdon once only to discover it only got 12 meg service somehow. I didn't even know you could get less than 80meg now.

[signal11]

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.

[SecondHandTofu]

Like many of London's woes, that's because of planning, councils have to approve infrastructure and block it: https://www.londoncentric.media/p/why-exactly-is-londons-pho...

I'd say it's developing-world tier, but a lot of the developing world has really good 5G signal these days.

[dgxyz]

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 NIMBY old fart and was asked to leave. She single-handedly blocked it for 5 years due to council connections. She dropped dead. Stuck on 20 meg ADSL until that happened.

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.

[userbinator]

I'd say it's developing-world tier, but a lot of the developing world has really good 5G signal these days.

They also have a much bigger population using exclusively mobiles rather than landlines, since their infrastructure developed when the former was already available, and it's cheaper to just put up a few towers than run one landline to each subscriber.

[hdgvhicv]

During Covid people were attacking engineering laying fibre because it was “5g”, and facebook had told them 5g caused Covid.

[mgaunard]

tl;dr people reject installing ugly masts in densely urbanised neighbourhoods, meaning there often isn't enough capacity for everyone to get fast 5G.

[KellyCriterion]

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

[alexfoo]

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

[hexbin010]

640 or more customers stream TikTok at the same time