The Natural Philosopher wrote:
On 04/08/2019 10:11, Harry Bloomfield wrote:
Brian Gaff pretended :
Do they not use each others resources though? I'd have thought they
might have negotiated a deal by now.

I understand if you do a 999, that can route through what ever mast it
can find, which suggests they do not share resources otherwise.

Indeed it is a mystery as to why they dont.

It doesn't work.

The networks are sized for the numbers of subscribers they have. In a
universal roaming situation, everyone who can't get on their home network
will try to pick the strongest/closest base station. That means the mast
becomes overloaded and drops off the network, meaning all the phones now
seek out for the next strongest mast. Rinse and repeat. Result is that all
the base stations are knocked out - and the signal is worse for everyone,
not better.

To fix that would mean speccing base stations to take 4x the capacity they
currently have (in case subscribers from all the other networks roam to it).
Which costs more, and is more expensive than the other networks building
their own infrastructure on the same mast (and mast-sharing already happens
anyway).

It is also a mystery as to why they dont use wifi calling at every
possible point. ISP always transfer tpo spmeone elses network at the
earliest possible point.

Wifi calling is just a tunnel from the phone to the carrier. It isn't clear
that the complexity in wifi calling is less than the complexity of the LTE
network - and now the networks have to maintain two networks with capacity
to carry all their subscribers, not one.

Theo