Emobile 3g and Roaming.

errlloyd

Hey, just on Emobile and I don't quite understand this, the 3g coverage I am getting is nowhere near as good as it was on O2, but the guy who sold me the contract seemed to imply that the networks had signed agreements allowing customers to use each other's networks. Can I just switch on roaming and connect to O2. Or am I horribly misinformed?

ardmacha

Emobile is basically Meteor. Now Meteor have some arrangements for roaming in sparsely populated regions on the Western seaboard and this should work without any intervention on your part. But they have no provision for you to use O2 3G in areas where Meteor 2G is available, which is probably your situation.

Max Power 2010

The sales guy sounds a little misinformed, I always found with some retail staff that they never really learn or care about what really going on with the network, its just sell sell commission commission.

2 things with EMOBILE/Meteor, they have a national roaming agreement with Vodafone in the west, where outside meteors coverage your phone will roam automatically onto Vodafones 2G network, not 3G, so GPRS (worse than dial up) is the only option for internet if thats where you are.

Another thing happening is Eircom(Meteor/EMOBILE) have just kicked off a Network Sharing agreement with O2, they are not sharing spectrum but equipment only. For example 02 have a mast across the road from a meteor one, one of the networks will shut one off, move the transmission equipment over and both will share a base station (RBS6000) and electricity power supply, so meteor/EMOBILE will eventually over the next couple of years match coverage like for like with O2 but infrastructure costs will be slashed for both.

This has only kicked off in Dublin, about 15 sites so far so it will a while before it benefits the sticks as such, both companies biggest costs are Dublin as this where there is the largest amounts of sites.

This info would of been trained to them and also readily available on internal intranet, but some just take what they want from it to make a sale.

lucernarian

That's unfortunate in ways, some places can have a much stronger signal from one provider compared to the others and if that is changed to a common site then someone living in a ground floor apartment may be covered from a moved site at the opposide side of the building!

I thought provisioning costs were falling dramatically as they increasingly used femtocells and small panels bolted to the corners of streets and so on. And in the UK, a concealed pole (they look a little like street lights) can be used on the street itself.

KrisW

While there is some consolidation going on, the O2/Eircom infrastructure deal is mainly for future sites. Where coverage is bad now, both O2 and Eircom will share the cost of providing capacity, and they'll share a single site.