Business

Pokemon Go shows it’s all about the coverage

Pokemon Go is the whole new craze
Pokemon Go is the whole new craze Pokemon Go is the whole new craze

AN app that began as an April Fool’s joke has become a worldwide phenomenon, taking gamers out of the living room and on to the streets as they compete to capture, train and battle Pokémon characters using their mobile phones.

In just seven days since the game was released in the US, Australia and New Zealand, Pokémon Go has now almost certainly exceeded Twitter’s 65 million American users.

The Pokemon Go phenomenon has caused some incredibly irrational behaviour. A British woman told The Sun newspaper that she was giving up her job as a private teacher to play the game full time.

Sophia Pedraza, from Barnet, north London, plans to sell the accounts on eBay once she has collected the most powerful Pokémon. She told the newspaper she plans to buy multiple phones to boost her productivity and catch Pokémon on multiple accounts.

Locally, a man jumped out in front of traffic on a road in County Down while playing Pokemon Go, police have said. They said they received reports of the incident on the A2 at Holywood and several other instances of people putting their lives at risk while playing.

One thing the Pokemon Go phenomenon has flagged up is the issue of mobile coverage and the notion that perhaps your mobile signal isn’t quite as good as you thought it was.

Poor reception is a common complaint, so you need to factor that in when choosing a network provider however you will find area coverage varies from network to network and is patchy throughout Northern Ireland. No single network delivers universal coverage.

You can do some prep work on this using coverage checkers to see how they map your specific requirements. OpenSignal is one of the more effective checkers.

Simply enter your location in the search box and it'll tell you which network has the best signal in your area. You can choose between 2G, 3G and 4G networks and can even find out the average upload and download speeds and see which network has the most reliable signal paying particular attention to in building coverage.

It'll be interesting to see how long the phenomenon lasts. Media coverage seems to be waning but if you plan to take your business to places you haven’t been before, literally, then maybe now is the time to make sure your mobile capabilities are up to the task of catching a bit more than a game character, remember it’s all about the coverage!

:: Eric Carson is director of Rainbow Communications and can be contacted via www.rainbowcomms.com. Rainbow Communications can also be followed on Twitter @Rainbow_Comms.