Wifi in the UK

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I keep thinking I should have typed ‘Anarchy’ up there.

Anyway, I’m travelling to the UK over New Year’s Eve and want to know about wifi. Will my phone/tablet work or is wifi connectivity somehow different in Europe? I’m resigned to my phone not working, but taking photos and posting them is something I’d like to be able to do.

2

WiFi is WiFi.
You just need to find a location that provides it. Our hotel did, but it worked much better in the bar then in our room, so that worked out well for them…

3

You might need a few bob to bribe the cheery concierge to crank up the meters, keeping a sharpish eye out for the peelers, but in general electricity works pretty much the same where it was discovered as in the colonies.

4

Yeah, we use metric WiFi over here, so you’ll need to multiply it by 2.54 to convert it from inches to cm.

5

Unless your device was built with metric parts. Then no conversion is needed.

6

Oh, stop it. For all I know it could be different frequencies or whatnot.

So there!

7

As far as I can tell, your WiFi hardware and software should be able to find some channels that their WiFi hardware and software is also willing to use. As mentioned, and this is not immediately self-evident because WiFi is a LAN protocol, the networking protocols are all the same so they’re not going to be a problem once your laptop and the router have a frequency channel nailed down.

8

Still, make sure you have, already or bought over here, a UK type or various European types if going further, outlet adaptor for your devices.

  • In the early 1900s the Isles’ cords were capped with the British Standard 546, or Type D hardware, which actually include six subversions of its own, all of which were physically incompatible with one another. This worked out fine until the Second World War, when they got the shit bombed out of them by Germany, and had to rebuild entire swaths of the country in the midst of a severe shortage of basic building supplies — copper, in particular. This made rewiring stuff an expensive proposition, so the government was all, “we need a new plug, stat!”*

Here was the pitch: Instead of wiring each socket to a fuseboard somewhere in the house, which would take quite a bit of wire, why not just daisy-chain them together on one wire, and put the fuses in each plug? Hey presto, copper shortage, solved. This was called the British Standard 1363, and you can still find them dangling from wires today. Notice how even in the 1940s and '50s—practically yesterday!—the UK was devising a new type of plug without any regard for the rest of the world.

…

In the meantime, this means that things really aren’t going to change. Your Walmart shaver will still die if you plug it into a European socket with a bare adapter, Indians will still be reminded of the British Empire every time they unplug a laptop, Israel will have their own plug which works nowhere else in the world, and El Salvador, without a national standard, will continue to wrestle with 10 different kinds of plug.
Gizmodo

9

I wouldn’t be resigned to your phone not working, depending of course on what kind it is. An unlocked smartphone with a GSM antenna will probably work just fine on a UK network if you get a SIM card. My Nexus 5, for instance, works on the following bands:

North America:
GSM: 850/900/1800/1900 MHz
CDMA: Band Class: 0/1/10
WCDMA: Bands: 1/2/4/5/6/8/19
LTE: Bands: 1/2/4/5/17/19/25/26/41

For comparison, here’s what the rest of the world gets:

Rest of World:
GSM: 850/900/1800/1900 MHz
WCDMA: Bands: 1/2/4/5/6/8
LTE: Bands: 1/3/5/7/8/20

So if I was going to the UK, I’d consider getting (for example) a Vodafone SIM. The Vodafone network uses the 900 and 1800 MHz bands for voice, the 900 and 2100 MHz bands for 3G, and bands 7 and 20 for LTE. So I’d get voice, I’d get 3G coverage, but I wouldn’t get 4G. Still, though, that’s still better in a no-WiFi area than no coverage at all.

10

If the little WiFi connection widget is on the bottom right of your computer screen, you have to move it to the left hand side in the UK, or there could be a nasty accident.