Don’t take your dongle to the dales!

Having lived in some of Scotland’s remotest areas, I have an appreciation for being digitally connected. I have a pretty decent ADSL connection in Forres, and I have a good mobile phone signal most of the places I visit in my local area. It can be patchy ‘out in the sticks’ but I never really feel ‘out of touch’.

When I went ‘south’ for my holidays this year, I had a choice: turn on the answerphone to collect my telephone calls and switch on the auto responder to reply to my e-mails, or take my phone and laptop and continue to provide a unbroken service for my customers.

I went for the second option.

It was a family trip, and we had three main stops on our itinerary: Lake District, Yorkshire Dales and Norfolk Broads.

They’re no metropoli, but I expect at least as good as the Scottish Highlands in terms of connectivity.

How wrong was I?

Travelling by motorhome gave us the flexibility we needed to avoid locations without a signal, but delightful as it was, weaving our way through the peaks and troughs of Cumbria’s impressive national park, prioritising a mobile phone signal on a family holiday doesn’t always go down too well with the passengers.

We did eventually find a very nice caravan park, Castlerigg Hall, near Keswick, which had the best view I have ever seen from a caravan park. Coincidentally (I promise you), it had a mobile phone mast in the grounds! Possibly the only one in the Lakes, but it meant I could finish off a job and catch up with my emails.

I expected the same to be true of the Yorkshire Dales, and it was. Perhaps even more so, I recorded 20 miles of unbroken non-service on the road between Richmond and Kirkby Stephen.

The fens of Norfolk would be different of course, no hills to get in the way of radio waves beaming out from all points of the compass.

Not half as bad as Cumbria and Yorkshire, but still a long way behind what I expected.

I must add at this point, that despite owning a large selection of maps, they stop at Carlisle and I had decided to navigate the hi-tech way with Google Maps on an iPad mounted on the dashboard.

Satellite navigation is not affected by ‘coldspots’ so I assumed there would be no problem in the remotest of areas. Silly me, because although the iPad uses GPS to locate you on the map, it uses an internet connection to display the map, so most of my navigation through the fells, fens and dales was assisted by a blue dot persistently throbbing away at the centre of a blank screen.

I believe, statistically, O2 has the best network coverage of all the providers, so this scenario really highlights how poorly connected the UK is when off the beaten track.

The networks may argue that it doesn’t pay to service sparsely populated areas, but certainly in the Lakes, there was no lack of people.

I think the percentage is something like 98% coverage for O2, so did I unwittingly pick the 2% of the country that has no signal, or is the figure a cleverly generated statistic that is difficult to prove wrong?

I may never know, but I did soon realise that I came on holiday to relax and when your work relies so heavily on ‘being connected’, it’s actually quite a nice feeling to know your phone’s not going to ring.

So while my customers generally appreciate me being there whenever they need me, I’m sure they also appreciate that I need to get away from it all sometimes.

And so after three days, I closed my laptop, put the cap on my dongle and enjoyed some of England’s finest holiday destinations.

I even found an old-fashioned hotspot – Great Yarmouth on a Saturday night!

More pictures from my visit to the Lake District