[rsynnott]

My impression (from pretty limited recent experience) is that mobile networks in UK cities (at least London and Manchester) are _notably_ worse than in other European cities. I initially thought it was just a London thing, and, okay, London's very, very big, but was recently in Manchester, which has no such excuse, and it was also pretty terrible.

Not sure what's going on there.

[Garvi]

Most people are shunning the covid topic for various reasons, so no one is bringing up the fact that the British torched a lot of their 5G infrastructure to "stop the spread of covid". There were over 80 such arson incidents, but I'm sure this number will go down with time.

[rsynnott]

I'm guessing that that was probably not in city centres, tho.

(Also, where're you getting 'over 80'? From a quick search there seem to have been maybe 5 masts damaged/destroyed.)

[Garvi]

In your search results. It was well over 80 at the time. 80 is the number mostly cited nowadays. I see you're down to 5 damaged. Good for you.

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/least-90-phone-masts-a...

https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-90-attacks-on-phone-m...

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-52164358

https://www.businessinsider.com/77-phone-masts-fire-coronavi...

[rsynnott]

Vast majority of those were not destroyed or damaged. I think some of the tabloids may have conflated "any vandalism or attempted vandalism" with "actually damaged", but, well, that's tabloids for you.

> I see you're down to 5 damaged. Good for you.

Who's 'you' in this context?

[Garvi]

That's not really ambiguous.

So it didn't happen, because it was *obviously* made up? The problem with such reasoning is, it does not require substantiation. You should find 20 people that also believe it(shouldn't have a problem on this platform) and you can start a religion.

[rsynnott]

I mean, I'm unsure why you're so excited about it. Whether it happened or not feels almost irrelevant to me (it'd be far from the worst behviour by loonies during the pandemic), but there seems to be very little evidence that it actually did happen in significant numbers.

Like, even if it had been 80 masts destroyed, the ongoing impact would be nil; they'd just have been replaced and 80 masts is in any case a trivial number (it's difficult to get numbers on how many exist because the ONS data counts nano cells, but there seem to be over 60,000 'real' masts in the UK, anyway.)