Black mobile spot

[Poly Hive]

Our new cottage is in a balck spot for mobile reception. 10yds either side is fine but in the house and immediately outside is useless.

Is there anything we can do to solve this as it is a serious issue for us.

PH

[Dibdib]

Talk to your mobile provider - some of them can provide a gizmo which connects via broadband and creates a mini signal area.

[PaulF]

Wot Dibdib sed!

If you're with Vodafone they have a SureSignal box that is effectively a mini mobile phone mast that will give you a signal. A few years ago when I got mine they were the only company both at offered it but I expect that others do now.

Alternatively look at other providers as it may just be a black spot for your network.

P.S. You do need a reasonable internet connection for SureSignal and similar to work as it users that for the first part of the signal to the network.

[Afasoas]

EE offer WiFi Calling with most of the more recent handset ...

[Poly Hive]

Okay. Not too good this as the best we are told we can hope for in the BB dept is 2 meg. As we currently have over 200 this is going to be a bit of a downer to say the least.

PH

[PaulF]

What's the upload speed likely to be?

2mb should be enough for you to hear the other party but you'll need at least 1mb upload for them to hear you well

[pcolbeck]

A phone call is far less than 1mbs. A standard landline phobe equates to 64kbps plus a little bit of IP wrapper overhead.

[PaulF]

A phone call is far less than 1mbs. A standard landline phobe equates to 64kbps plus a little bit of IP wrapper overhead.

May well be the case but to have a reasonable voice call using Vodafone SureSignal, from my experience, does not work well with an upload speed below 1mbs

[Oaky]

Not sure about vodafone, but O2 have an app (TuGo) that allows you to make and receive calls to/from your mobile number (and SMS) over your WiFi.  Not sure how bandwidth hungry it is comparative to voda's gizmo though.

[Morat]

Personally, I prefer the EE boxes because they're open to all EE phones so you've effectively got a tiny phone mast. The Vodafone boxes are closed so you have to list the numbers you want to have access to the signal on the Vodafone website. It's not a huge burden but it can get annoying if you reach the limit and have to drop people off/on.
I guess it's a small point but I thought I make you aware.

[mrcharly-YHT]

A phone call is far less than 1mbs. A standard landline phobe equates to 64kbps plus a little bit of IP wrapper overhead.

May well be the case but to have a reasonable voice call using Vodafone SureSignal, from my experience, does not work well with an upload speed below 1mbs

I used to live on a boat with an ADSL line that was 0.5Mb download, 0.25Mb upload and I used Skype to make phone calls (to landlines and mobiles) very often. Audio quality was just fine.

[Kim]

It's not so much the bandwidth (as long as it's sufficient) as the QOS:  VOIP (be it Skype, SIP/RTP or some proprietary thing) needs consistent latency and low packet loss, which means it'll start to go wrong if the link is being intermittently saturated by some other data.

Ideally you'd have some traffic shaping at both ends to ensure that the VOIP packets have priority and that the link never saturates (or have a dedicated line for the VOIP data).  Failing that, you throw bandwidth at the problem.  Failing that, you try not to go torrenting or let Windows 10 download itself or whatever while you're making a phone call.

Unsurprisingly, things get worse as the number of simultaneous calls increases.  Fortunately, that's unlikely to be more than about 2 in a domestic environment.