Back in business

Isn't that strange? As mysteriously as my 4G signal indoors went, so it has returned. And it's not as if the weather has got much drier. True, there were glimpses of brightness around midday, but by mid-afternoon a fine misty drizzle was back. I am now definitely putting this incident down to the bad weather, rather than to a power-down of one of the local EE masts. The nearest mast to me is at Burgess Hill, and when I went to see it yesterday afternoon I saw no signs of malfunction. There were no engineers around, trying to fix a fault; and I was getting a very powerful 4G signal when sitting nearby in Fiona. Enough to sizzle an egg. So the drop in signal must surely be blamed on the watery atmosphere we've endured hereabouts.

I'm not of course assuming that the 4G signal is back for the rest of the winter. Who knows, it might fizzle out overnight tonight. But for now, I can access Mobile Internet as normal. Which is just as well, as there are a couple of emails I want to send off. I want the recipients to get them before Christmas Day.

This outage was the first significant loss of 4G and Mobile Internet (albeit for only two and a half days) since I stopped using through-the-landline-wire Home Broadband early last September. I suppose that's actually pretty good, certainly better than one might expect in a semi-rural location several miles from the nearest mast. 

I'm now assessing how much it really mattered, not having instant access to Mobile Internet inside my home. It was an inconvenience, to be sure. 

I'd got into the habit of checking a number of websites for fresh content right through the day, such as the BBC News website, and several others to do with tech or photography. It was irksome not to look at them when I wanted, especially in the evening. I didn't fancy getting cold, sitting in the car or caravan, merely to get a viable signal. 

Nor could I listen to, or watch, catch-up radio and TV. This wasn't a very great loss, but being deprived of the option was a niggle. 

The chief reason to grouse was that I couldn't look up things on the Internet, which is something I do constantly. I'm interested in all kinds of stuff, and I regard Wikipedia as a wonderful resource for digging deeper into anything that catches my attention, such as the planet Neptune, the nutritional value of honey, where to buy another hairband, and whatever happened to Pinky and Perky and Lenny the Lion. It was frustrating, being unable to get a quick and full answer. 

I'd been keeping all my many Word documents and Excel spreadsheets in Dropbox, and therefore in the Cloud. No 4G meant no access. I update some of these files several times a day. I could do something about this. While up in Burgess Hill, getting a full blast from the mast, I moved all the most-used files offline. I've done this before, when on holiday in spots where Mobile Internet has yet to penetrate. It has the distinct advantage that the files display in a flash, with no wait at all. And of course they are on my phone, accessible everywhere and anytime. The only downside is that there is no automatic backup to the Cloud. But a manual backup regime is easy to devise, and I can back these vital documents and spreadsheets to the Cloud while visiting a town or city where the 4G is fierce enough to bake bread. 

Only joking about the alleged heat radiation, by the way. I'm sure those mobile phone masts add little to the general background radiation from the sun and other natural sources. 5G? Please, as soon as possible. In fact, I'm thinking I may be able to test the benefits of a 5G connection on the new phone I intend to buy this spring. The men of the village do whisper that 5G is available in central Brighton. So maybe, once I'm innoculated against the virus, it might be safe to go there and experiment. Mind you, I expect the long-abandoned streets will still be full of slavering virus-zombies, staggering around with groping arms. It would be a nuisance if one of them jogged my arm, and made me drop my shiny new phone. Tsk.

Sequel

The restored signal hasn't dropped away again. A friend who knows about these matters thought that all along it had been an equipment fault, and not the rain - a failure in some interconnected component, not necessarily at my local mast. Well, they must have dealt with it now. I should take some comfort in knowing that modern mobile phone infrastructure should be more easily fixable than ancient landline installations! 

Another friend told me about how someone we both know, who lives at the head of a very rural valley in the Forest of Dean, has recently got rid of her Home Broadband and installed a purely 4G setup, involving a sensitive exterior aerial linked by wire to an internal router, which gives her much better Wi-Fi at home. But an exterior aerial isn't always needed. In my less sequestered location, such a router might pick up the 4G signal perfectly well if merely placed near the right window. It might also be excellent in my caravan (a router like this would be portable, and I could take it on holiday and enjoy my own in-caravan Wi-Fi). I can easily buy my own router.

This could be the way for me to go. I'd need to pay for a data-only SIM for the router - an additional monthly expense - but on the other hand I wouldn't need to buy nearly so much data for the SIM in my phone. The saving on the phone SIM could cover the cost of the router SIM. And I could be a complete tart about choosing separate, keenly-priced SIM deals for router and phone. 

My current phone SIM deal expires on 26th May, so there's plenty of time to consider the whole thing carefully in the next few months. The more I think about it, though, the better it seems.