Taxi Driver Online

Hi everyone,

I'm new here. I found this forum when searching for others who'd been let down by Mercury 2 and it's good to know I'm not alone.

Having read through all the posts on here I'm left wondering if anyone has successfully managed to terminate a contract with Mercury on the grounds of it being unfit for purpose?

If so, are there any tips you could share? If not, what were the main hurdles that tripped you?

Thanks in advance for any help.

Cancel it and walk away, if your tied into one of their finance deals phone the finance company up and tell them your woes.

How they've made it this far is beyond me, you'd better look sharp because they're closing their offices down, there's only a handful of staff left.

TBH - given they ALL rely on the mobile phone network to comm to the datahead/PDA and the internet for the system can you imagine any of them being 100% reliable?

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Of all the things ive lost, i miss my mind the most

Not at all, but the issues with Mercury are not just to do with signal issues. The dispatch side of it regularly fails to work. The telephonist and controller software crash several times a week. And the back office side of it is just a total wreck. It is genuinely worse than using pen and paper used to be.

Thanks for your input. Seems like a sinking ship to me. Just last week I filed a bug report and was told that they "no longer support the software".

I hope you get it all sorted out. Please let me know how you get on.

I hope you haven't fell for their dual sim card deal? "The same dual sim card that immediately connects to another network if you loose connection to the one you're using at the time." We all know they don't connect immediately, they can take anything up to 6 minutes to find a signal.

Not all of them are w@nk like Mercury, some systems that work off the mobile phone network do so without problems.

I'm sure Datamaster Bill will be along to clear things up.

The systems will be perfect when the mobile phone networks are perfect...

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Of all the things ive lost, i miss my mind the most

Many are, it's just a few cell sites that are out of date.

thats the driverless cars fooked too then

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Of all the things ive lost, i miss my mind the most

Difficult to advise on the Mercury question, but if it was my company that was having issues and there was no support then I’d have no hesitation about looking elsewhere.

Everyone want’s 100% reliability but unless you’re prepared to pay to cover at all the possibilities then you’re never going to achieve it. We provide backup facilities for all potential points of failure but if the company chooses not to follow our recommendation then they cant really complain if things go pear shaped.

Leave out all the techy stuff and just take simple power cuts that everyone understands. It doesn’t matter whether you’re on a modern system or just radio, the backup power will only last a short time and yet how many companies actually bother to get a small back up generator?

On the techy side, the Internet doesn’t fail it’s just certain providers that occasionally break (more so the cheap ones) so having a second provider gets round that one albeit at a cost. And it’s a similar situation with the mobile networks where a second or roaming sim can get around any outage.

The bottom line is if you don’t like taking advice and do everything on the cheap then don’t expect 100%

Bill

Who would you recommend for the sim/data cellphone coverage?

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Of all the things ive lost, i miss my mind the most

I make it a point never to recommend one network over another as everything we’ve ever seen indicates that they all work pretty much the same. Locally, one network might be slightly better but most times people of the area would know what’s best for them. That said, the networks are constantly changing to meet the needs of the public’s hunger for ever faster data so what you have now may be different in six months time.

A lot of the issues complained about on here probably stem from those who advocated the use of roaming sims. All our testing to date (including the most recent sims) have shown these to be the worst possible option for taxi use. Fine if you’re running a fleet of lifeboats out at sea but in the urban environment it’s virtually impossible to loose the signal from an entire network. Even when the signal is fine, these are switched and routed all over the show before they reach the office and as a result they show a much higher degree of random latency (bufferface )than a normal UK sim.

Other than that, my best advice is don't swap your cow for some magic beans, try each network first then stick to a major provider rather than some Mickey Mouse re-seller.

Bill

so unlocked phones and/or dual sim phones?

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Of all the things ive lost, i miss my mind the most

Wannabeahack

The short answer is yes but it’s worth noting that only about 50% of our customers choose to use a backup sim.

As a matter of interest, I’ve just completed a week of testing with all the main networks. The tests involved taking four modified PDAs and deliberately driving through known poor reception areas all over the north west and Cheshire in an attempt to loose the networks. To our amazement, the results showed 100% reception on all primary networks. The roaming Sim on the other hand did completely loose its data at one point for three and a half-minutes and this occurred while the car was parked and connected to the same O2 mast as the regular O2 test unit.

Very occasionally, all sims showed a small degree of data lag (buffering) especially as they switched from mast to mast but this catches up quite quickly and no data is lost.
No huge differences to report but EE seemed least laggy while the roaming sim with it’s longer overseas routing as expected was the worst.
All testing was carried out using the 2G network btw.

There you go. You now know as much as me!

Bill