trapped in cell phone hole
Aug. 24th, 2010 11:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacWhy was I walking around my neighborhood carrying a pair of cell phones, which I'd periodically flip open and stare intently at, while not talking into either one?
When I first signed up for cell phone service, I went with a company called Cingular (which I pronounced khingular, it having genuinely not occurred to me that it was intended to be pronounced singular. They should have spelled it with an S, like a normal person would). I forget why; possibly because they had a conveniently-located storefront. Soon they were bought by AT&T. As both my local and long distance phone service (then still separate) were from AT&T, as were my cable and internet service, and one of my credit cards, I was coming close to having the compleat AT&T experience, though I had to write five separate checks to them each month.
All was well until we moved house and discovered that our new locale, though in no other way an unusual slice of Silicon Valley, gets terrible cell phone reception. It never rises above 3 bars and is normally lucky to get one. It is very difficult to use the cell phone at home, which causes various inconveniences as you might imagine, one of several reasons we're not going commando and giving up the land line.
Occasionally I'd hear about Verizon and their wonderful coverage, how much better it was than AT&T's. The possibility of switching occurred to me, but it would be a nuisance in itself, and I also didn't think I should make the jump without checking it out first. But the process of signing up for a new account and then cancelling during the tryout period if it didn't work also seemed a nuisance.
What finally convinced me to check it out was a visit I paid to a friend's home in Redwood Shores. (I think I know more Paulas than any other single woman's name. This was one of them.) I tried to call B. at home, but could raise no cell phone signal at all.
This was ridiculous. Redwood Shores is a large, newish, well-off residential development, perfectly flat, in the middle of San Francisco Bay. There should be cell phone service there, if anywhere.
So I borrowed a Verizon phone to see what happens. And the answer? Their service has the same hole in my neighborhood. The signal is usually a bit stronger than AT&T's, but not consistently so, and not so much better as to make it worth switching. What I was walking around for was to determine the size of the hole. This too was tricky, as signal strength fluctuates from moment to moment, and the lowest it gets outside the hole overlaps with the best it ever gets inside. But it seems to be about 3/4 of a mile in diameter, and we're not quite at the center of it. That's AT&T's hole. Verizon's, though less holey, is larger.
And Redwood Shores? It turns out that that black hole is just in Paula's pod complex next to the water. Out on the main road you can pick up a signal. (Whether there are other holes in other pod complexes I didn't check.) Again, Verizon is a little better. But, up in the rolling hills that surround the bay, including where I work, it's Verizon's signal that's weak. AT&T's is full strength.
I'm not switching, and now I know for sure that even in the heart of techydom - I'm not a mile from Apple headquarters, for instance, though they're well outside the hole - cell phone service is still inadequate.
When I first signed up for cell phone service, I went with a company called Cingular (which I pronounced khingular, it having genuinely not occurred to me that it was intended to be pronounced singular. They should have spelled it with an S, like a normal person would). I forget why; possibly because they had a conveniently-located storefront. Soon they were bought by AT&T. As both my local and long distance phone service (then still separate) were from AT&T, as were my cable and internet service, and one of my credit cards, I was coming close to having the compleat AT&T experience, though I had to write five separate checks to them each month.
All was well until we moved house and discovered that our new locale, though in no other way an unusual slice of Silicon Valley, gets terrible cell phone reception. It never rises above 3 bars and is normally lucky to get one. It is very difficult to use the cell phone at home, which causes various inconveniences as you might imagine, one of several reasons we're not going commando and giving up the land line.
Occasionally I'd hear about Verizon and their wonderful coverage, how much better it was than AT&T's. The possibility of switching occurred to me, but it would be a nuisance in itself, and I also didn't think I should make the jump without checking it out first. But the process of signing up for a new account and then cancelling during the tryout period if it didn't work also seemed a nuisance.
What finally convinced me to check it out was a visit I paid to a friend's home in Redwood Shores. (I think I know more Paulas than any other single woman's name. This was one of them.) I tried to call B. at home, but could raise no cell phone signal at all.
This was ridiculous. Redwood Shores is a large, newish, well-off residential development, perfectly flat, in the middle of San Francisco Bay. There should be cell phone service there, if anywhere.
So I borrowed a Verizon phone to see what happens. And the answer? Their service has the same hole in my neighborhood. The signal is usually a bit stronger than AT&T's, but not consistently so, and not so much better as to make it worth switching. What I was walking around for was to determine the size of the hole. This too was tricky, as signal strength fluctuates from moment to moment, and the lowest it gets outside the hole overlaps with the best it ever gets inside. But it seems to be about 3/4 of a mile in diameter, and we're not quite at the center of it. That's AT&T's hole. Verizon's, though less holey, is larger.
And Redwood Shores? It turns out that that black hole is just in Paula's pod complex next to the water. Out on the main road you can pick up a signal. (Whether there are other holes in other pod complexes I didn't check.) Again, Verizon is a little better. But, up in the rolling hills that surround the bay, including where I work, it's Verizon's signal that's weak. AT&T's is full strength.
I'm not switching, and now I know for sure that even in the heart of techydom - I'm not a mile from Apple headquarters, for instance, though they're well outside the hole - cell phone service is still inadequate.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Mobile reception
Date: 2010-08-25 08:40 am (UTC)An area of the size that you mention in which reception is so poor seems a matter of bad network planning. Possibly large structures have been erected since the network was originally planned and this may aggravate the problem.
The signal will, however, always fluctuate quite a lot on a short scale — in particular in urban areas a few steps may take you from a full signal to nothing at all. In an urban area the signal in any given spot will often be comprised of reflections from the surrounding buildings rather than a direct line-of-sight signal from the base station. In some circumstances these reflections may cancel out while in other circumstances (just a few steps down the road) they may add up and strengthen each other (I suppose that constructive and destructive interference of waves is part of the American high school physics curriculum?). In the industry this phenomenon is known as "fading". It can also be experienced when e.g. listening to the FM radio in the car. As you stop for a red light, the radio suddenly becomes very noisy and difficult to hear, but going just a yard or two back or forth will give a perfect signal again.
The number of bars is generally not a reliable indicator for two networks unless you are using two phones of the same make and model. While there are requirements to the accuracy of the phone's estimation of the received signal strength, there is no standardized way of converting this estimated signal strength to bars. So if a company wishes to give the user the impression that it is receiving a better quality than it is, they will increase the number of bars shown for mid-range signal strengths, while, if they wish blame the network, they will decrease the number of bars in the same situations.
There are also big differences in how good different phones are at utilizing the available signal strength and how good they are at filtering out any unwanted signals. Measuring this in a systematic way, however, requires expensive equipment (the appropriate metrics have to do with digital errors such as the ratio of erroneous bits to the total number of received bits) that generally makes this an issue of big companies that tend to keep these things to themselves (including the company that I work for — I am sorry that I dare not say too much here).
Should you manage to find a study that compares different phones, however, I can at least point out what you should be looking for ;-) In the 3GPP world (the organisation in charge of standardizing GSM, UMTS and LTE), the characteristics that you are looking for are the "BER" (Bit Error Rate), "BLER" (BLock Error Rate) and "FER" (Frame Erasure Rate) in "Reference Sensitivity" (low signal conditions).
Troels Forchhammer
(Nokia Denmark)
Re: Mobile reception
Date: 2010-08-25 09:18 am (UTC)"Possibly large structures have been erected ..." Not around here. There's nothing in the hole but single-family houses and a few two-story apartment buildings, and they've all been here for years.
"always fluctuate quite a lot on a short scale — in particular in urban areas a few steps may take you from a full signal to nothing at all." Indeed, and I've noticed fluctuations on that level, though mostly around much larger and solider (e.g. concrete) buildings. But this hole is 3/4 mile wide, not a few steps. The surrounding area has a full complement of bars on both phones.
"there is no standardized way of converting this estimated signal strength to bars" Sure, but I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that, in general, more bars = stronger signal, fewer bars = weaker signal. The pattern is consistent across both networks.
"There are also big differences in how good different phones are" Four different types of cell phones have been used in our house, and they're all bad.
I think the fluctuations and differences you're discussing are on a much more minute level, both in terms of the signal strength and the geographical distances, than the one I'm discussing.
Re: Mobile reception
Date: 2010-08-25 03:39 pm (UTC)The question then becomes, does Verizon use the same towers, or at least the same pattern of towers, as AT&T, or different ones? (The way that one FM station can fade out because you're on the edge of its reception area, but another is strong because its antenna is in a totally different location.)
And the answer turned out to be, at least around here they use the same ones. Therefore, the problem is endemic, and switching carriers or getting a better phone, though it might alleviate the problem slightly, will not solve the problem the way switching the dial to a different FM station would.
Re: Mobile reception
Date: 2010-08-25 05:01 pm (UTC)But as more and more people use cell service and WiFi, there might not be the degree of opposition that would have been raised even five years ago. (Frankly, I'd think that increasing cell reception would increase property values.)
Re: Mobile reception
Date: 2010-08-25 07:54 pm (UTC)2. If ST&T doesn't already know where their reception is good and bad, based on known locations and power strengths, they're idiots.
3. The last thing we need around here is increased property values.
no subject
Date: 2010-08-25 03:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-25 03:44 pm (UTC)