Don’t miss Dangerour Demos hosted by James Body at ClueCon 2026. Register now at cluecon.com/register

Sorry, this will be a bit of a rant. There's so much to consider that's happened alongside this, such as reallocation of frequencies within 4G networks to 5G, and the rollout of 5G Standalone (some describe it as 5G ) which doesn't rely on combining 4G and 5G. 3G remained a very useful layer of coverage, especially in rural areas, as it generally seemed to travel further than 4G, but also because most phones would try to cling to 4G for longer leaving 3G empty. I'd sometimes use it at large scale events because it'd be totally uncongested! The effect of removing 3G has been that areas of poor coverage will now drop to 2G, which is basically unusable as a data connection these days, or it'll cling to poor quality 4G which is prevalent in the UK. I don't think just the removal of 3G can be blamed for everything, but rather the UK as a whole has a fundamental and systemic issue of failing to invest in its mobile networks because, as a market, everyone is very price sensitive. Running a mobile network becomes a race to the bottom, with networks undercutting each other on pricing to the point that they can't spend money on the network improvements they need to be functional in modern society. The railway also has various issues with mobile coverage too, with a lack of RF-transparent glass you'd see in other countries (or on EMR's new Class 810s), and a lack of on-board signal repeaters (used to exist on VT's 390s and 221s, but were removed in the early 2010s). I've actually been working on a project for the last few months that collects real-world mobile signal metrics on the railway to predict how poor someone's experience will be on a journey. Lots of other replies have been saying some networks are better than others, but so much of that is subjective, and location dependent. No-one is objectively better. Three and Vodafone are slowly merging their networks, so they might have be bad individually, but now they're fairly good, but soon they'll be turning off many of their sites to cut costs post-merger and they may well turn bad again! I always get rather amused when people say O2 or Vodafone is better, when they both actually share the majority of their sites across the country through a JV called Cornerstone Networks.

Teléfonos públicos barrio de Al Ras (Dubai) #cabinasporelmundo

Lil' tidbit from @NickvNetworking Simple trick to increase coverage in Android nickvsnetworking.com/simple-…

I, like most network engineers of my generation, got into the industry after growing up watching "Track That Packet!". (Weekdays at 10:30am, between "Card Sharks" and "Win, Lose, or Draw!", on NBC.)

Ah, Windows. The OS you're forced to use when you have to run some vendor toolchain or proprietary CAD software. But otherwise, no thanks, I'll run a real OS to get work done, without wild obfuscation, and being nagged by crappy agents and adverts and generally dire UX.

Hacker News commenting on this is more sober news.ycombinator.com/item?id…

Teléfono de uso público TUP aún en servicio… en el Refugio Estós a 1890 m. de altitud. Benasque (Huesca)

I bought a $10 MiFi Dongle and pulled it apart. It runs full fat Android, without a screen - it's just a regular phone in a USB stick and for $10! Already planning some kind of Rube Golberg mobile load testing setup... nickvsnetworking.com/adventu…

Handset / baseband manufacturers IMS stacks always come up with new ways to ruin my day. We're seeing certain Samsung phones stops sending RTP mid-call and instead send random unidentified data (Not IPv4/v6) making the UPF unhappy and drops the bearer. nickvsnetworking.com/tales-f…

#ArtofWAN #NetworkEngineering

Elixir Melbourne is back! Next meet up scheduled. Thursday September 25, 6pm. Hosted by @SuperAPIdev Talks: - “Optimising Elixir Code With Gratuitous Macro Usage” by Julian Doherty - Open speaking spot! Get in touch. Details and RSVP at meetup.com/elixir-melbourne/… See you there

Welp. The "build it and they will come" experiment is over.

Really happy to be involved in this, and nice to be able to talk publicly about the projects we've been working on!

Merchandising…

Pretty wild security fail in a big operator's IMS - @o2 and @mavenir allowing their debug SIP headers through the P-CSCF to the UE, exposing the cell ID, IMSI and IMEI of the B party...

Kamilio World 2025 is live streamed: youtube.com/live/p4ZrY2DxmCU… #kamailioworld. Come say hello if you're around 🙂

If you've ever wondered how big systems did observability at scale before computers, welcome to the wonderful world of the mechanical counter: nickvsnetworking.com/before-…

"It used to cost money to call someone, and if that someone was in another country - you would pay a premium: in the mid-90s a prime time call to Paris from New York cost around $113 an hour (in 2025 dollars)"