I'm still waiting in the lowly backwater of Hartlepool for O2 to pull it's finger out after getting it's second planning approval for a 3G mast installation, a year after the approval was given.

Of course the first planning application had the kibosh put on it by some Victor Meldrew type who thought it didn't look very nice.

I sincerly doubt that the other parts off the UK are less enfranchised with this outlook.

Mines the camouflaged tree looking 3G coat.

Never mind Hilton, where's the iPhone angle?

Couldn't be anything to do with them throwing money at their EDGE network to keep the iBling fanboys happy?

IIRC Edge is just a software update that is required to the cell site, theres no real infrastructual change required (except maybe a bigger data backbone to deal with the demand). 3g requires a whole lot of new equipment to be installed on site.

Even though Edge is normally a SW update you almost certainly would pay the supplier a license fee to use the SW. So its more than the increased cost of backhaul infrastructure!

Edge uses different modulation type to GSm so is more than a software update.

Slow coaches....

In Australia we built a HSDPA network that covered over 96% of the population from day one in 10 months from concept to day 1 of customers...

An average of one base station was built and activated every 25 minutes day and night over that period.

On top of that it shared the spectrum with a CDMA network, was the first to activate 14.4Mbit across the network and it now covers 98.8% of the population...

Far be it from me to make assumptions about differences in geography and population distribution between the UK and Australia, but I rather suspect that these are two rather different situations and it would be a little bit silly to compare the two.

Just out of interest, do you have the same sorts of tortuous legal processes, and armies of anti-mobile-phone-mast campaigners in your part of the world?

Could it be that in australia, masts are shared between operators, rather than every operator requiring its own complete set across the country?

Phone masts are bloody ugly. Phone operators are generally lazy and try to stick them up in the first place they think they can get away with it.

In my experience O2 are more conscientious than the others, actually working with the community to find a good spot, rather than pulling all the tricks in the book (TMobile) to avoid any public consultation.

So it's a shame to see that, as ever, ruthless commercialism triumphs and O2 are being slammed for being responsible.

Or maybe it's just the iphone thing.