http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-30946005

I don't know if Three are worse than BT - it's like a choice between different dog turds.

So in a couple of years we're going to have a choice of Vodafone, BT and Hutchison. Not a massive choice.

Have to be honest, Three have been fine as long as I've been with them. And with stuff like the 'use your phone in Europe on your normal tariff' thing, they at least seem to have some idea that they're providing a service rather than just collecting money. O2, on the other hand, were arse when I was with them (admittedly some time ago) so while less competition is theoretically worse, it may actually end up wih a better deal for their customers.

Obviously the long term is an issue but I think competition in a marketplace is a slightly more complex issue than 'Four legs good, three legs bad'. Two competitors kicking lumps out of each other is better for customers than four 'competitors' who in reality have an informal cartel going on.

I'd settle for the first one to provide a half decent signal in my house. According to their coverage maps all the big networks offer a strong signal in our street. Perhaps I just live inside a victorian faraday cage and can't use a mobile 90% of the time at home - as well as all my neighbours.

3G is a pipe dream, and 4G is about as likely as a lottery win.

I can't work out of the recent improvement of mobile signal strength in my house is due to Vodafone upgrading the masts for 4G, or because my new phone has got a better aerial than my old one.

The mobile network is... a weird thing. All sorts of signals interfere with it and it even interacts with itself when it echoes off objects -if you're at just the right distance from the mast with an object just the right distance behind you, it can pretty much cancel the signal out completely even if there's no other radio for miles. Predicting how good the mobile phone signal is in a general area is doable, predicting the value on any given square meter is practically impossible.

My Brother's house is new - built in the last 10 years - so it's no way your 'built by Kingdom Brunel' thick walled job, but while you can get a great mobile signal in his kitchen, you can get next to no signal at all in his living room. And they're adjacent rooms!

As an aside, there's only one piece of software all the mobile networks around use to crunch the numbers and decide where they need to put masts and what have you. It's also the software that works out the heat maps for coverage once the masts are in place. It was developed in the UK back at the start of the digital mobile phone network growth by Vodafone. It makes them tens of millions of pounds a year in licensing fees.