Sir – I would like to add my voice to your paper’s comments and those of James Elles MEP concerning the sorry state of mobile phone reception in rural Oxfordshire.

I operate an Orange phone for business reasons and a Vodafone one for personal purposes. I use two, because Orange is barely available where I live just off the A420 (I have to go to the top floor, and only in one room). However, Vodafone’s reception is also very patchy. For example travelling on the A420 from Oxford (one of the main trunk roads in and out of our county as you well know) there are numerous blackspots. These are around Cumnor Hill, Tubney, just after Kingston Bagpuize and so on.

It is virtually impossible to receive/make a phone call (safely of course) as one has to guess where the next spot of available signal is located.

In Witney, as some readers have also pointed out, reception is also patchy.

In Culham, near the European School, one has to find specific spots in its outer car park to get a semblance of a signal.

And this doesn’t take into account the availability of the much-vaunted 3G network, which is derisory outside the boundaries of the city of Oxford and a couple of other larger towns. Interestingly, a look at some of the main operator’s own network maps of future coverage of 3G will actually show a decrease, rather than the opposite!

I travel on business across Europe very frequently and I can’t think of any other country where the coverage is so unsatisfactory. Indeed, I have travelled in remote areas of Spain and of the south of Italy, areas inhabited by few hundreds people, with excellent local network coverage (including of one of the operators mentioned above).

Maurizio Fantato, Bampton