3G 4G 5G Anyone?

Earlier this month, during London Tech Week a large sector of the telecommunications industry was keen to promote what is happening with the emerging 5G standard and the various pilots and technology trials being conducted to demonstrate what you can do with faster, less latent mobile networks and increased capacity. Everyone was keen to show how it makes wide scale implementation of IoT with billions of devices possible.

Meanwhile in the real world, Virgin is busy implementing its own 4G network freeing itself from its historical dependence upon EE's infrastructure. This is obviously a huge investment and critical to its future operations. So it is a pity that the roll out to customers has been so poor. The standard letter provides simple instructions, which when followed leaves many Virgin customers without a working mobile 'phone. My wife's experience has been that it left her phone unable to receive phone calls or text messages, although she could send texts and make calls. This is not good if you rely on your mobile for business as she does. Anyway, on phoning Virgin, she was told that she had not registered the SIM card which Virgin had sent her. She was then told she would have to wait until Monday (from Friday lunch time) for the SIM registration to take effect. One has to ask, why Virgin did not pre-register the cards when they were sent out. BTW, I also received a card from Virgin because I am upgrading from 3G to the new 4G network and was told that my card was not registered either. Requiring every single customer to contact Virgin at more or less the same time to register a SIM must be a major implementation bottleneck and the result of a poorly thought out implementation plan. Let's hope that the coverage of the new network is good. As I live in a village where traditionally only EE's network worked well.

Moving on from the parochial to the transatlantic, I have to thank Adam Stead, from Nimbus Ninety, for pointing out the Elon Musk and the Farting Unicorn story from the Guardian, in his weekly news letter. This is a truly funny farce which could have been avoided. Hopefully he reaches an amicable and mutually satisfying arrangement with the other protagonist, who is complaining about alleged breaches of his artistic copyright.

In the meantime, I have put my money where my mouth is and bought a Dreem headset, to see if it really will deliver the promised enhancement to my sleep patterns. Once I have a few weeks, apparently 5 weeks is the period over which I should notice this, I shall report back in another blog.