Letters
Tell us what’s on your mind
I was hit by both phone outages last year
In Issue 727 (page 9) you asked whether readers were affected by the BT and Three phone outages last summer. Well, I’d like to claim the prize by being adversely affected by both outages. When Three’s network failed on 25 June I was waiting in hospital for an important and much-delayed operation and needed to stay in touch with my son to be picked up. This proved impossible thanks to Three’s outage and I had to borrow a phone from a fellow patient who was sympathetic to my plight.
My son was so annoyed by this outage that he told me to ditch Three and lent me his BT/EE phone while I organised a permanent switch. But then on 24 July, EE’s network failed, bang in the middle of a train journey to my sister’s and before I had a chance to call her to arrange meeting me. Again, I had to borrow someone’s phone!
I’ve now switched to Vodafone and all has been well. But I await the next outage with trepidation.
David Lyons
How the BBC can catch licence-fee dodgers
In response to Issue 725’s ‘Question of the Fortnight’ (‘Should the BBC use iPlayer to catch licence-fee dodgers?’), all the BBC needs to do is require a name, address, email address and TV licence number to have a BBC account and watch BBC content. The data is already available.
Furthermore, if the Government made it a legal requirement for all devices that can stream BBC content to require this information prior to watching BBC content, then third-party providers of BBC content and smart TV software providers would also need to comply. We wouldn’t even need to wait until people purchased a new smart TV as any software update could introduce this requirement.