I haven’t posted for a while, partly because I’m on a small boat here in the Argolian Gulf, courtesy of my kind friend Philip Sargent. The photo above was taken just a couple of minutes ago.
It’s my first trip to Greece, and I’m loving it. The temperatures well into the 30s are hard to take, but there’s quite a bit of compensation in the fact that if you step off the boat into the turquoise water, as I do a couple of times per day, it cools you pleasantly to its 29C.
I can’t really blame my radio silence on lack of connectivity, though, since absolutely everywhere I’ve been has had excellent 5G coverage, including at this tiny port where we spent last night.
Why can the Greeks manage this when, at home, just a couple of miles from the high-tech hub that is Cambridge, I can only get a poor 4G signal?
Yes, I know, some of it is to do with the fact that they have mountains here, and that a lot of the signals are travelling over water, and so on, but I can’t help feeling that perhaps the gods on Olympus look more favourably on cellphone users than some other deities.
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All those mountains in Cambridgeshire must pose a real challenge…
I switched to an MVNO (Lycamobile, via an eSIM) who use EE, and find I get 5G around most of Cambridge, and many other places (including here in Windermere). I’ve previously been with MVNOs who used O2 and Vodafone (within the last year), and can categorically state I’ve never seen 5G in Cambridge with them.
That being said, I don’t find 5G any/much faster than 4G, that I can tell, and I think in some phones it can run the battery down quicker (I’ve got an iPhone 12, FWIW). I’m glad Greece is so advanced. And you’re missing 15 degree rainy weather here! (well, today at least it rained all day, so I took the kids to the cinema in Ambleside; Saturday was glorious however, so we got to climb a fell and go boating).
I have been finding that my phone runs down much faster here, but perhaps that’s because it’s almost always on cellular and not on WiFi … or perhaps because the battery doesn’t like being at 35C!
Mmm. I remember I wrote something about 5G a few years ago…
https://statusq.org/archives/2019/07/11/9020/