Mobile Network Comparison

We’re now well into March and it’s time to have a look over the previous month’s news from the world of mobile phones.

In February we’ve had some interesting technology headlines. The month started off with lots of new Android phone rumours and the announcement of HTC’s new M7 flagship smartphone. The HTC CEO Peter Chou revealed it before Chinese New Year and took some photos with its massive 13 MP camera. It was later revealed that the official name will be the HTC One and it will come with a 1080p display, a quad-core 1.7 GHz CPU and 2 GB of RAM.

Other Android phones announced were the new Intel x86 powered phones and the Samsung Galaxy IV strongly hinted for an April (or even March) release. Just in time for Android Key Lime Pie which is due soon after.

We also got rumours about new Windows Phone devices, the Lumia 520 and Lumia 720. Both will have 1 GHz CPUs and half a gig of RAM and will be fully announced later at Mobile World Conference.

February saw iTunes hit 25 billion song sales. That’s a lot of albums. In other Apple news, the Exchange calendars bug was fixed with the release of iOS 6.1.2.

RIM also launched their new version of their mobile OS, BlackBerry 10. They also announced their new handsets, the traditional Q10 and the touchscreen Z10.

But enough of that. Continuing our round-up, here’s our selection of the very best articles and news stories from February. If you missed them the first time round, they’re well worth going back to take a look at.

Bill Gates: We were wrong about the iPhone

In this post we looked at an interview with ex-Mircosoft CEO and tech kingpin Bill Gates. In it, he hinted that Microsoft is willing to admit that they completely misjudged the smartphone market. Microsoft were initially very dismissive of the iPhone when it first came out but since its massive success, they have been desperately trying to play catch up in the mobile field. And not just because they are struggling with the dwindling importance of their traditional strong point – desktop computing. Only time will tell whether they are too late.

4G auction falls short and 4G auction winners and losers

It’s been a long time coming by Ofcom finally completed the final round of the much-anticipated 4G mobile spectrum auction. In the end, there were a couple of surprises but some people were most shocked by the fact it raised over £1 billion less than expected. We contributed some analysis as to why the auction was such a flop and how this is going to affect George Osborne in the run up to the next budget. Our other article went into more detail about just how much spectrum each company bought, whether you’re likely to get a better signal now and how it shifts the field for the nationwide roll-out of 4G services.

Data to be more important than voice in 5 years

Finally, thanks to a report from the GSM Association we took a peek into the future where mobile data is predicted to change the way we live. The pervasiveness of high-speed mobile internet access around the world is expected to make a huge difference to our lives especially in healthcare, transport and education. Could there really be savings of £250 billion just from mobile phone networks?

We hoped you liked our look back at the month of February 2013 and checked out our favourite articles. What were your favourite news stories?

Virtual network Virgin Mobile has come clean about its slow mobile internet speeds. A Virgin staff member called “Krystal_E” has posted an an official statement on the community forums confirming that they are heavily throttling the mobile data connection.

It is claimed that the speed cap is just a “trial” but it affects all customers whether they are on contract plans or PAYG and there is no ending date. Despite numerous denials about deliberately slowing down internet speeds, the throttling has and has been in place since February.

Virgin are arguing that they are throttling internet access to ensure they can “offer a good level of service to all customers”. But in their admission, they revealed that the current cap is set at 2 Mb/second down and just 0.5 Mb/second up. Now many users are complaining they can’t stream videos without constant buffering.

There is some argument for putting a speed cap on mobile data in order to guarantee service for all customers and prevent a small minority from hogging all the bandwidth. However, 2 Mb/second is far too slow and severely limits what you can do with your mobile.

And in any case, to play devil’s advocate, surely it’s the mobile company’s responsibility to ensure they have adequate infrastructure available to meet people’s needs? Why sell so many SIM cards if you can’t provide a decent service for all your customers? This is especially true for Virgin Mobile as they run on EE’s network and they should have plenty of spare 3G capacity.

Virgin Mobile is also being somewhat dishonest as they recently introduced “unlimited” data plans. However, by putting in a speed cap, they are necessarily introducing an artificial hard limit to the amount of data you can download. You wouldn’t have to be a massive cynic to think that maybe they underestimated how much people would take advantage of the unlimited tariffs and are introducing this change to try and limit people after all.

Virgin Mobile users are doubly annoyed as there have already been many changes this year making the mobile data provision worse. There were changes to the fair usage policy limiting monthly usage as well as a ban on tethering back in January. The latest news that they are throttling users’ data access to such a low limit is sure to annoy people.

Indeed, the Virgin Mobile community forums are now replete with outraged customers threatening to move to other networks that don’t cap their mobile data. Questions also have to be asked why it took so long for Virgin to own up to this change? Are they not in the habit of being transparent with their customers?

Some of the furious quotations from customers include “they deserve to be taken to the cleaners on this one”, “I’d personally report Virgin to the ASA” and “I signed up here specifically to state that I’ll be requesting my PAC at the end of this month”. Probably our absolute favourite is as follows:

Joined Virgin on 1GB package on the 16th Feb and left today for Tesco because of all this nonsense … Bye bye Virgin. It’s been a short and messy three weeks. Like a holiday romance with a pretty girl that turned out to be bipolar.

In response, Virgin has claimed that they will never reduce the cap any further. But that’s unlikely to placate their customers most of whom realise that Virgin Mobile hardly make any money on data as opposed to voice calls and suspect that the network is merely trying to reduce its outgoings at their expense.

And the problems don’t stop there. Virgin’s customers are also reporting that the cap is implemented poorly so you get sudden bursts of data followed by almost nothing. While it averages out to about 2 Mbit/s overall, it doesn’t make for useful internet access. We’ll be monitoring the situation closely to see if anything changes. In the meantime, you might want to think about changing to another network that offers a better unlimited data service.

Are you on Virgin Mobile? Did you notice the cap already? What do you think about this decision? And will you be staying with them or jumping ship?

This video shows a guy going for a relaxing swim in his lush pool the night after a big night with his mates. Only it turns out there’s a surprise MMS waiting for him. It’s pretty hilarious and some things don’t need any translation.