Communicator and campaigner. Director of @bufferingbrit. Senior Consultant at @CharlesbyeStrat. Palace fan 🦅
Joined August 2021
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Britain’s phone signal is a national disgrace. @Jack_Nostalgic and I are launching a campaign to fix it. Watch the video, check out our website, and get involved. There’s lots more to come.
I don’t usually post things like this, but it’s only fair to give credit to my coach. Yesterday I made a withdrawal from my crypto profits, and today I was able to purchase a car quite remarkable. Grateful for the progress, thanks to @NikolinaSabljc for the guidance.
Ben Cope retweeted
An ineffective planning system and a lack of political will is why phone signal is so bad in Britain. Great to feature in @TomTugendhat’s piece. In the coming days, we’ll put the power in your hands to show where signal is worst, to put pressure on decision-makers to fix it.
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By pure coincidence, I was in @TomTugendhat’s beautiful Tonbridge constituency yesterday visiting Hever Castle, and I can confirm the signal there is unusable. Please do read his piece on how to fix Britain’s signal (+ a Buffering Britain feature).
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Signal in London is terrible and getting worse!
Pleasure to speak with @AliceBhand, @FeryalClark, and @KulveerRanger about how we can fix it.
📉📱 London’s mobile network is one of the slowest in Europe. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
Our Director @BenHCope told BBC Politics London how we can fix it👇
Ben Cope retweeted
We don’t know how bad we’ve got it. @TomTugendhat’s right: Britain’s phone signal is a national embarrassment that’s holding us back. We need a planning system that lets us build the telecoms infrastructure we need.
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Might want to expand that King’s Cross office even more…
The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees.
The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance.
Access to all other Claude models is not affected.
We apologize for this disruption to our customers. We believe this is a misunderstanding and are working to restore access as soon as possible.
Read our full statement: anthropic.com/news/fable-myt…
Bringing @BufferingBrit to the BBC. Pre-recorded segment done. Tune in to BBC One on Sunday at 10am to hear how embarrassingly bad London’s mobile signal is - and what can be done to fix it.
Progress should be beautiful. Terrific initiative.
UK AI Minister @KanishkaNarayan breaks down the Best Designed Data Centre Prize and why the AI opportunity should feel aesthetic as well as economic:
"Think about the last set of industrial transitions, people built amazing bridges... that was a functional thing, but the really important thing is those bridges were beautiful as well."
"I want to make sure that in this AI transition we're building things that aren't just expanding opportunity in terms of jobs and pay, but building a new aesthetic as well".
"I want that opportunity not just to feel economic but to feel aesthetic."
Lots of replies questioned whether German internet speeds on trains really was any better than the U.K. Here’s the evidence. Embarrassing for us. The government’s new initiative is welcome but there’s so much ground to make up.
I’m taking a train from Frankfurt to Leipzig. Germany’s phone signal is so much better than ours. People are streaming videos, sending emails, and making calls. I took a train from Manchester to London at the weekend and I had to give up the work I’d planned because the signal was so poor. It doesn’t have to be this way.
Ben Cope retweeted
Frustrated by your phone constantly buffering at the worst moments?
New research commissioned by Buffering Britain in collaboration with the Centre for British Progress shows mobile network congestion is costing UK consumers between £490 million and £785 million every year in lost value.
In London, where we have the most detailed time-of-day speed data, the hit is £150–260 million annually – and it could climb closer to £370 million when you look at the raw evening peak numbers.
They combined willingness-to-pay figures from a major European study with real Opensignal crowdsourced data. Peak times in London see speeds drop to around 65% of uncongested levels, sometimes as low as 46% in the worst hours and that lost performance adds up.
So what’s the culprit here? As with so much else in Britain, planning rules are slowing the buildout new masts and small cells on street furniture.
We kept the numbers conservative, adjusting for common survey biases and focusing just on speed for now. Latency spikes during congestion would push likely the total even higher.
Buffering Britain is campaigning to cut through the red tape and get Britain properly connected.
If poor signal is driving you mad, come join the fight. Poor connectivity is a choice – we can make a different one.
Read the full working note here: bufferingbritain.com/researc…
I’m taking a train from Frankfurt to Leipzig. Germany’s phone signal is so much better than ours. People are streaming videos, sending emails, and making calls. I took a train from Manchester to London at the weekend and I had to give up the work I’d planned because the signal was so poor. It doesn’t have to be this way.
Ben Cope retweeted
New research shows that poor phone signal is costing us up to £785mn a year in lost consumer welfare.
If you, your company, or organisation are fed up with the buffering then we want to hear from you as we devise the fix for this most frustrating problem.
New modelling by @BritishProgress for Buffering Britain puts the direct consumer welfare cost of Britain's mobile network congestion at £490–785 million a year. Here's how they got there. 🧵
£785 million a year. That’s the direct cost of poor phone signal in the U.K. £260 million in London alone. This is holding the country back. We need to fix it.
New modelling by @BritishProgress for Buffering Britain puts the direct consumer welfare cost of Britain's mobile network congestion at £490–785 million a year. Here's how they got there. 🧵
Ben Cope retweeted
sometimes i cannot take the uk seriously.
america has reusable rockets going to space. thailand has full 5g in the jungle. qatar airways has starlink at 30,000 feet.
meanwhile i pay £140 for a return train ticket and get 1.19 mbps download and 0 upload.
this country is not serious.
Ben Cope retweeted
Yesterday, @BenHCope wrote for the Spectator about how his own experience of poor phone signal is unfortunately all too common. Some key points:
- Britain's phone signal ranks 59th in the world, behind countries like Kazakhstan
- It costs the UK up to £7bn a year
- A planning system that blocks rather than builds is the key culprit
- Buffering Britain is going to fix it.
Ben Cope retweeted
We spoke to GB News about why Britain's mobile signal is so bad, what it's costing us, and what can be done to fix it.
Ben Cope retweeted
Britain has worse mobile connectivity than Kazakstan, Peru, and Vietnam. A first world country shouldn't be at the mercy of the buffering wheel.
@BenHCope and I are launching a campaign to fix things. Watch the video and check out our website below. Plenty more to come!