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Where's Your 'D-Spot?'
John Hering writes "The battle between cellular carriers in the U.S has become especially fierce within major metropolitan areas. The focus of this battle clearly revolves around issues of quality of service (QoS). In an effort to demonstrate superior QoS, AT&T Wireless has just released the results of the Top 10 "D-Spots" in Chicago from a survey conducted online with a random sample of 520 Chicago men and women. Although AT&T touts improved coverage throughout these metropolitan areas now, the vice president of AT&T Wireless, Greg Slemons, has publicly admitted to serious problems with dropped calls. " I have yet to see really detailed coverage maps for cellular provided by the providers themselves; in cities especially a one-block difference can mean 3 bars of reception or none.
Um...
Anyway, I can't use my cell phone in my own house, which rules out using it as a land line replacement. I can barely get decent reception in my back yard.
I'd rather not have the tether anyway.
I have been with several wireless providers, including AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile. From my experience so far, AT&T had the worst service of the three. T-Mobile has been growing fast, and I get amazing coverage wherever I have gone. In fact, I've actually seen the network expanding. On my annual drive from my home in California to college in Colorado, there used to be no service at all in Nevada or Wyoming. Now, I have full service on the drive through all those states. I have also found the customer service to be excellent. That's just my 2 cents on the cell phone battle... I think T-Mobile is trying very hard since they are move of an up-and-comer than a giant like AT&T.
if this going to be really useful (and not just a lame showy gimmick), AT&T had better generalize these results nationwide.
But I can show you my 0-face!
:-()
Mmmm... finding the d-spot... g-spot... Gotta find that damn g-spot... er, I mean d-spot. Oh, fuck it, I'm a pervert.
---
Never criticize religion on Slashdot. You will be modded down for "Troll" no matter how factual it is.
is right here in my living room. It seems that most places I go, my Nextel phone works wonderfully. Sit down on the couch and try to take a call and bye-bye little signal bars. I can move around the room and I'm still dropping off. I live in a wood-frame house so I very much doubt it's metal interfering with the signal in any way, and the living room is on the main floor.
I don't suppose having three pc's and two laptops in a constant on state in the house along with my WAP would have anything to do with it, would it??
I am really interested in the validity of this list, as I do have AT&T wireless. My biggest beef about this is that Old Orchard Mall is an outdoor mall and I have never had problems with dropped calls there. Places, like Rosemont convention, Gurnee Mills, Woodfield, I can understand. But if you're getting dropped calls on an outdoor mall, I think they've got bigger problems at hand.
Why hasnt ATT and friends done this for other places like NYC, LA, and SF
Linux is like living in a teepee. No Windows, no Gates, Apache in house.
I swear, everytime I make an unclear phone call in a legit zone, I should be compensated somehow.
Considering I don't live in some remote area, there is no reason why I should ever struggle with the signals. But I do?! WTF.
The first person to make a joke about D-Spot and putting cellphones on vibrate wins a prize!
Living in Chicago it is pretty obvious that most of the major players in the cell phone market have spent quite a bit of money making sure that their networks cover the city proper, well.. properly.
I have a sneaking suspicion that out of the top ten locations they listed as "Drop-spots" suffer from a lack of scalability in their network infastructure. During non-peak times coverage is decent over most of the locations listed in the article. O'Hare and Midway have not been terrible to me the handful of times I have flown into and out of them, and Union Station is a massive bastion of marble and steel (Chicago's commuter train yard) so I imagine that indoor coverage is quite poor there.
This article doesn't do much to say a whole lot about anything in particular.. just a nicely wrapped AT&T pitch.
A casual reader might think that AT&T turned up 400+ new cells, but a closer reading seems to indicate that it signed up 400+ new sites in your local coverage area where they will slap you with a nifty roaming charge.
There are coverage maps for gsm readily available for various countries, including the US, at gsmworld.com
Here in Canada, a dropped call is almost unheard of in our major cities, (all 3 of them :) Understandably, the infrastructure in the US is significantly outdated compared to prettty much everywhere else in the world, but that should be no excuse for such sloppy service.
Sprint PCS has reasonable coverage and reasonable service, although here in DC I go into roaming whenever I use the Metro..
What bothers me the most about them is the lack of phones with Bluetooth
The perfect sig is a lot like silence, only louder
AT&T knows when their system drops a call. When I used their service a year ago they would credit you some amount for each dropped call. They could simply look at the % of calls that each tower drops. That would give them a good idea of where they need to put more towers. Of course, this would lead to them installing a tower in my house.
Lasers Controlled Games!
Stuff like this would be nice to know... I can see a cell tower out my window. It's less than a mile away. But when I'm at home, I get no f***ing signal! If I want to use my cell phone at home, I need to be sitting in a certain place in the living room, facing out the window that views the cell tower -- otherwise no signal. A few blocks away, the signal is clear and strong. If I'd known this, I might have rented a different apartment... Is there a reason for this kind of void? If I switch carriers, will that make any difference?
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
This is a load of crap. This just 10 extremely heavily populated places!!!!! These have to be the top 10 usage spots as well!
from the report...
The top ten Chicago Drop-spots include:
1. O'Hare Airport
2. Midway Airport
3. Union Station
4. Woodfield Mall
5. Navy Pier
6. Six Flags
7. McCormick Place
8. Old Orchard Mall
9. Gurnee Mills
10. Rosemont Convention Center
This means one thing...
RECEPTION ALWAYS SUCKS. We've collectively drank the "mobile Kool Aid" (And you thought mLife was just an advertising campaign) and now believe that paying 50 bucks a month for CB Radio quality reception is OK.
So where in Chicago does reception suck?
I can tell you everyone I most commonly drop out on:
-S-turn on North Lake Shore Drive
-East Wicker Park area
-North Ravenswood/Lincoln Square area.
Heil Sig! -Rob
I have the same exact problem, with Sprint PCS in a medium-sized city in Florida.
I have to walk outside my house to get a decent connection, and anywhere else in the city the phone seems to work great. Bizarre.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
i live in times square ;-P
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I have yet to see coverage maps provided by the providers themselves which haven't listed the same areas as "coverage coming soon" for the last -ten years-.
Not to mention, aren't wildly optimistic about coverage. Pretty much all of them show every major interstate as a full-service coverage area, and that's utter bullshit, even between New York and Boston on I-84/684 and the Mass Turnpike.
Please help metamoderate.
It has some power lines on the very same street they have like 3 different company antennas(who makes such decisions here!!). Ill tell my mom to try and get another job since in that street i even have trouble making the car alarm thingy to work.
Its funny though its a banking area, so many white collars are walking round the corner just to stare at their mobiles with dismay.
"The quality of life is inversely proportional to the number of keys on your keyring."
It's portable darkness.
My pocket-sized personal cellphone jammer is, I mean.
It's fun to press the button and watch people STFU and drive.
resigned
on my old phone (POS Audiovox) I got awful reception, but with my Motorolla 120C I get good reception pretty much everywhere.
...and I can't remember *once* where I had a dropped call in ANY of these places.
I know of one dead zone for Nextel on Golf Road about a mile west of Old Orchard Mall, but *THAT'S IT*.
I thought all of those PC were not supposed to interfere with other RF devices by FCC rule? So much for industry self-regulation? I have been lied to!!!!!
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
...with women faking that you've reached the D-Spot?
Forget zones - there are discrete spots in my area (Houston) where I drop EVERY time. Southbound on the Beltway 8 access road just south of Richmond Drive - its so predictable I could do a countdown as I drive and talk. 3-2-1 Goodbye. Comes back in 30 seconds. There's a half dozen spots like that I drive through regularly.
"Would you, could you, with a goat?" Dr Seuss
The NYC Department of Consumer Affairs (DCA) last year began tracking NYC 'dead spots' for all major carriers in the city. COmplaints can be made on the web or by dialing 311. Initial results are available at nyc.gov.
Ut Tensio, Sic Vis
I live in Richmond, VA, and have Sprint PCS. I have been totally nonplussed with their service. I get no coverage anywhere near my home, and I drop calls consistently. I've had my phone diagnosed, had the latest firmware installed, et cetera. Sprint reps keep telling me they don't have to guarantee coverage in any one location -- they just have to provide coverage /somewhere/ within their total coverage area.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
Apparently on my couch in my apt. Consequently, this is also my G-spot, as that's where I'm using my new laptop to write this over 802.11g. (btw, wifi-box will rock your world if you've got a Linksys WRT54G router)
They called up the other day and gave me 500 more minutes a month at no additional charge if we would agree to recontract for an additional year. I had the Suncom(before they were bought by AT&T Wireless) unlimited incoming call plan (10$ a month for no limit on incoming calls and no per minute charges) and previously they had refused to allow my account any plan modifications unless I gave that up. They said this time I didn't have to so I gladly recontracted. So they are worried about something or someone.
"GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 51230 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Setec Astronomy)"
I solved all my reception problems in one fell swoop. I fully discontinued my use of cellular services. No phone, No pager. It took me a couple weeks to get over my withdrawls, but I am now very very happy.
No longer can my employer get me whenever they want. No longer can my friends pester me 24x7. No longer am I distracted by my phone while driving. It actually made a positive difference in my life to ditch that particular technology.
written on my notebook connected to the internet by 802.11x ;) -nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Teacher: You're thinking of something else, son.
Click here for an explanation of this post.
Unknown host pong.
Having just switched from AT&T to T-Mobile after problems with lousy coverage and being annoyed with their (past) roaming charges (in this day and age, roaming in Cincinnati, OH shouldn't incur roaming...) I'm hardly inclined to defend them, but if you'd read the article in its entirety you'd have noticed that they no longer charge any roaming fees at all for people on their National plan.
Only on slashdot can a posting be rated "Score -1, Insightful".
The obsession with the small little handheld cell phone is one I just plain do not understand. Sure, it looks cool from an image standpoint, but it's senseless from a tech standpoint.
I really wish the embeded-in-the-car cell phone hadn't gone out of style. Next time you're in the passenger seat of somebody's car, compare the reception of the car's AM/FM radio to the reception of a handheld Walkman. It's just plain going to be no contest on stations that are not extremely local. The car radio has access to a nice big antenna outside of the car, the handheld device doesn't. Simply put, you'd get better reception in your car if we still had the little swizzle stick on the roof.
The second most annoying dead spot is the home, and exactly the same principle can apply. A roof-mounted mast gets much better TV reception of stations more than 10 miles away than rabbit ears on top of the TV set.
Bluetooth or WiFi would be a great tool to use in order to make the "last mile" link between the handset and the actual RF transmitter and reciever. Why should the user be expected to walk around their own home because one side of the house has coverage but the bathroom doesn't? It'd do wonders for apparent coverage and battery life if our handsets would pass off the task of actually speaking to the cell network to hard-mounted devices that have access to either grid power or at least the car battery, so the device in our hands can save its battery life for the times that we're really out on the road and need the handheld transmitter.
The dead spot that's most likely to make a user switch carriers isn't the airport, it's the places where the user spends the most of their non-working time... their home and their car. If they're getting cell calls on company time, then the company's responsible for picking and paying a carrier that works at the work site. Still, a localized dead spot can usually be solved simply by using a short last-mile connection to get to a high point outdoors where radio signals usually are clearer...
AT&T drops calls? What? And they drop calls in Chicago's airports? Duh! numpeople>numcellchannels -> dropped calls. Why is this news again?
I don't know that this list of the top ten drop spots really shows much. Those places were likely the most frequently listed because it is probable that a large number of people in their sample group spent time in these areas because they are common destinations.
What isn't shown here is that it's probably just as likely for a customer at any other random location in the city to drop a call. While AT&T and others should focus on areas that get heavy traffic, they must not do so at the expense of the rest of the city.
It will be interesting to see how T-mobile's coverage is affected by the discontinuation of the roaming agreements with Cingular (http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-5219679.html). I live in Chicago and have rarley dropped a call in some of the areas listed with either Verizon or AT&T. But, Wicker park absolutely blew for Verizon, and Lincoln Park sucks for both. I have both services with multiple modems and phones for stuff... Dropped calls are consistent among both services in the area, and the fact that Verizon couldn't get decent coverage in Wicker Park was maddening.
Competition is good!
I've travelled all over Texas quite a bit, based out of San Antonio, and use AT&T for my work cell phone.
In any of the larger towns (50k+) it tends to be good, without many dead spots.
The IH35 and IH10/90 corridors have good coverage.
Taking 281 between San Antonio and Dallas is another story. If you've taken this route, odds are good that if I mention 'that McDonald's on the hill in Lampasass,' you know EXACTLY what I'm talking about. This is the only location for about 250 miles that you can get a signal.
Of course, west Texas heading towards El Paso or heading up towards Amarillo is mostly dead once you turn off IH90.
Most of the sticks have spotty service, which unfortunately, I'm in too often. I'm told that Verizon has good coverage in these fringe areas.
I've used my AT&T cell on trips taking me to Denver, Burbank/Valencia California, and to Calgary/Banff (Canada...duh). All those locations were good.
Odd spots:
The Sybase offices on the 19th (?) floor of Lincoln Center in Dallas. If you put your cell phone down on the table, you can watch it rotate between Digital, Extended Area, and Roam, and watch the antenna bar go up and down--while the phone sits still.
The Amerisuites near Aurora (Denver) Colorado. As soon as you walk into the main lobby, your signal dies. Step into the elevator, and as soon as the doors close you get a signal again. It's clear all the way up and back down, until the elevator doors open again at the lobby. Walk outside the lobby about 30 ft from the building, and you get a full signal again.
Hey, it beats the hell out of Sprint PCS. That was just a total POS, and rarely worked at all.
Believe it or not, you can do this with a couple of mobile antennas and some coax cable. It's called a passive repeater, and it actually does work, but may not provide enough gain for your purposes (it has no gain at all beyond the inherent gain of the antennas you use).
Take one antenna and put it in your living room or where you want to do most of your calling, then put the other one outside, on the roof or in a window that gets good reception with the cell phone normally.
Hook them together with some 50 Ohm Co-ax, RG-58 will do nicely but not for more than about 50 feet. If you need more length get a lower-loss Co-ax like RG-213 or RG-8.
Then, go in to the area where you call from and try it. You might be surprised. A buddy of mine worked for Motorola in an RF lab, and he couldn't hear his local Ham Radio repeater, so he did exactly this in his lab (read: Faraday Cage) and hooked an antenna inside the lab to one on the roof and it worked! That was at 440 Mhz, but cellular should work fine at 880 Mhz as well.
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
That list was pointless...it was essentially the top ten highest foot traffic areas in the city. Of course you will have the highest concentration of dropped calls where you have the highest concentration of people trying to use their phones.
Please, address a real issue, like the fact that Hyde Park has awful coverage when factoring the number of customers in the community.
-R
I have cingular and my mom has sprint. I live about 1/4 mile from lambert airport (STL) here in St Louis. Neither of us can get a decent signal here. In my computer room, where I spend most my time ( suprise suprise! ) I cannot even get a signal. Anyone know if the airport is the reason why my signal sucks or is it just a fluke?
Me and my girlfriend drove down to New Orleans and I had a better signal in the middle of nowhere in Mississippi than I do in my own home in a midsized city!
superman runs linux
I know that T-Mobile has very detailed maps that employees may access -- I'm sure the major carriers have this as well, so just ask a salesguy when you look into your next phone.
Since my area is a little rural, but between some big cities (Baltimore and DC), my cell reception can vary wildly. So I asked the rep at the store, and he goes on the internet and shows me very detailed maps of their coverage (tenths of a mile in scale). I asked if I could view these pages at home, and he said it's only for T-Mobile use, and so it's not publicly available. But the data is there.
Anyway, I can't use my cell phone in my own house, which rules out using it as a land line replacement. I can barely get decent reception in my back yard.
I now have a similar problem in the "East Bay" of the SF area.
My house has aluminum foil on the vapor barrier of the insulation, so I expected poor reception when I first got my phone. But it worked fine at that time. (Proababy due to the large windows.)
But lately my reception all over the east bay has been getting rotten, and it has been virtually impossible to get a connection at home.
The phones aren't flaking out. (I've enabled the field test mode in both mine and my wife's. The signal strength meter still indicates about the same strength it used to on the road, and the two phones agree.)
But I've recently found out that AT&T wireless is converting many of its 800ish MHz TDMA cell cites to GSM. (My phones are TDMA.) With the reduced number of TDMA channels available I now have some major dead spots - at home, at work, near the 880/237 interchange, etc.
Even when I DO see good signal strength, making a call will often make the signal disappear. I think what is happening is the phone is reporting that it's in communication with the cell on the control channel - but when all the signal channels are in use so you can't get a new one, the phone reports it as "service unavailable" as if it couldn't reach the cell.
Unfortunately, I have already purchased a pots-adapter cradle for the phone model in question, to use the phone for service in my vacation home, and this wouldn't work with a newer phone. GSM has lower voice quality than TDMA. I use the phone for travel, and TDMA+AMPS coverage is still far broader than GSM+TDMA, and there are few (one?) GSM+TDMA+AMPS phone models available. And if I switched I'd either have to buy the phone or lock into the service for two more years.
So I am in no hurry to switch to GSM. And if I do (and if Verizon has added coverage at my vacation home location, which wasn't available when I first got a cell phone) I'll want to switch carriers as well.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
How come mobile phone users are having so many issues in the V.S. From the above commments it sounds like europa 5 years ago.
;-)
Are the united states only recently switching to gsm? Europa has an 95% gsm coverage (just from my experience). Shouldnt the V.S. reach that as well? (metropolitan arreas atleast).
I already consider it normal to phone in the subways
200GB/2TB $7.95 Coupon: SAVE90DOLLAR
AT&T's GSM network in CA is totally crap. The network that T-Mobile is buying, on the other hand, is really, really good. I've been on both sides.
Cingular is really playing themselves on this deal, if it is true.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Ok, now can anyone tell me what 1 'bar' of signal strengh represents?
Simple Unexpected Concrete Credible Emotional Stories
Imagine finding 500 non AT&T customers and asking them about drop out problems and lo they are all places where AT&T customers have no problems (unlikely?). Has AT&T installed stuff to block competitors' signals?
I think the sample of around 500 people is too small to be significant anyway. I could survey that many people that I know with mobile phones and only three of them would have been near a hotel, conference centre or airport in the last 6 to 12 months.
Here, we still have bugger all coverage the minute we get out of line of sight with a capital city. I liked the Vodaphone signs in country NSW that promised more coverage while my Vodaphone said no signal - next to their poster.
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.
...which had the exclusive contract to build in the Metro. Any analog carrier can roam down there, though with varying degrees of success and cost.
;]
I heard rumors that the GSM carriers were working to build a common infrastructure for coverage throughout the Metro, but said rumors also suggested a 2005-05 timeframe. I can't wait. I'm moving
"I woo women with my sensuous and godlike trombone playing."
even if you have full reception (full bars) your call can still be dropped for whatever reason. people seem to take the two as being linked, but it's not necessarily the case, at least from my experiences (Cingular, AT&T, Sprint).
My last move took me from one of the newest buildings to the oldest, compressed my cube, and moved me very near the door. My co-workers that were moved with me joke that we're 1 step away from being kicked out the door.
Back to the topic. Reception sucks when you are half underground in a cement building. If I want to use my cell at work I have to go upstairs or near the windows.
You can lose something that is loose, so tighten the loose item so you don't lose it.
I finally dumped AT&T as my wireless carrier after a marathon of bullshit. You don't have to read the story below. I'll be happy if you (and everyone you know) just refuses to do business with them ever again.
Long story short:
o lousy signal and poor reception EVERYWHERE
o connections that mysteriously go bad at exactly 4:00 minutes into the call (unless you're calling AT&T)
o months of phone calls to their so called "customer service" getting put on hold, transferred at least three times, then dropped
o "corrected" bills that never show up
o same billing mistakes repeated month after month, with compounding fees and charges
o wasted a day in the store with a face-to-face that took over two hours
o the final straw: they disconnected my service in the middle of an extremely important phone interview. This after I had been assured my newly fixed bill was on it's way, and that there was plenty of time in my billing cycle -- BTW: the disconnection occurred on the same day I received the new (and still incorrect) bill.
o I gave AT&T what turned out to be yet another three hours of my time (five phone calls due to being dropped four times). I gave them every chance to be reasonable -- finally just spelling out a list of demands and suggesting they have someone call me before close-of-business if they wanted to keep a customer. They'd rather transfer me 15 (yes, fifteen) times, asking me to reconfirm my address and re-tell my whole story each time.
By now you're thinking this was a long way to go, especially when it's so easy to change carriers these days. But, I had been a CellularOne customer since 1989 before AT&T took over last September. Think about that! Fourteen years! I had always been able to work out problems before. I had a bunch of resumes out with my cell number on them. (And I really didn't want to punch my whole address book into a new phone!)
Too bad, AT&T. You took a winning, mutually beneficial arrangement, and turned it into a losing proposition for both of us. Say good-bye to a fourteen-year customer. One who had multiple phone lines and had, at times, spent thousands of dollars a year on telecom.
You'll never see another cent from me. It's all going to one of your competitors now. The money you think I owe you? Try to collect -- I'll make you spend even more.
Forget about ever getting a recommendation or referral. In fact, every time your name comes up, expect me to tell my story. When I see your other customers on the street, I'll strike up a conversation -- guess what the topic will be. In a business setting, I'll advise people to build their own phone company before choosing AT&T.
Oh, you've also managed to anger someone who knows how to use the internet. Know how to remove piss from a swimming pool? You're welcome to try.
I tried Sprint, got zero reception in my condo (unless I stuck my head out the window). Tried AT&T, reception is good = no more landline, cheaper phone bills. Figure out where you spend the most time on the phone (i.e. home, work, traveling), and then find the carrier that gives you the best reception in that spot. There are huge differences between carriers.
Not to troll or criticize, but I've found the exact opposite to be true around here.
Pretty much the whole %$# city. Yea, I works OK in Georgetown and downtown, but get anywhere out of those main areas and you get 2 to zero bars almost everywhere.
T-Mobile is also one of the few carriers that DOESN'T have repeaters in the metro (subway). It reall sucks to have to sit there with a dead phone waiting on the train while everyone else can just yap away...Better sound quality, higher powered transportables, far fewer dead zones, true nationwide coverage; it's no wonder they're doing away with it!
Note to Slashdot. We need an Offtopic/Informative mod. My post clearly fits both. Unfortunatly, my world of sex wisdom gets modded down. Is it any wonder Nerds and Geeks are labeled as virgins and sexually ignorant.
I take the time to help a fellow geek, and this is the thanks I get. *sigh*
Life is not for the lazy.
I have yet to see really detailed coverage maps for cellular provided by the providers themselves; in cities especially a one-block difference can mean 3 bars of reception or none.
You likely never will. Before getting fed up with the IT industry, especially the corporate IT industry, I was a technical manager at AT&T Wireless. My team worked on a GIS project to show coverage data, among other things. We wanted to use the actual coverage information which would have shown gaps in the coverage and everything, but the legal department wouldn't allow it. Instead of actual RF propagation data, we wound up using hand drawn approximations, then forbidding the user from zooming in to a level of detail that they could hold us accountable for the accuracy of the maps on a local level. Because Engineering already had the data in a compatible format, it would have actually been easier to use the true data... Oh well... :-)
Mine goes to 11!
Take that!
That green slime had it coming.
Just called T-Mobile, and yes, they really are buying the Cingular network in California.
And Cingular just bought the Brooklyn Bridge.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
As an ex-employee of an infra-structure manufacturer and somebody who wore a hat for performance issues on the R&D side (dropped calls, crappy 1G/3G performance etc..). (This before being laid off and replaced by 5 units in India...)
The #1 REASON THAT YOUR CELLPHONES ARE DROPPED IS: Operating Companies that only want to hire high school educated operators.
I can back it up!
Compare the service presented to you by the Au-region KDDI services in Japan to US offerings that use the same equipment. KDDI hires post doctorates to plan and run their systems! US companies hire advertising and MBAs to plan them and high school grads to run them!
YOU NOTICE THE DIFFERENCE! That's the difference between science and bloodsucking.
Only three bars? My phone can get 4!!!!
The revolution will not be televised. It won't be on a friggin blog either
Here's my advice to you. The next time you have tied yourself up and are masturbating with an ass-carrot, I urge you to do this: Shove your head up your ass and keep it there until you suffocate. Isn't my advice helpful? I'll probably be modded down for this, but I just had to say it.
It's not as easy as it sounds. Problem with Chicago areas are that the buildings create multipath for the RF signal and also do wonders with interference and pilot surprise (if you don't understand these terms, you probably don't work in cellular). Basically speaking, there are times that the signal will bounce off a building in such a fashion that you'll get very good "coverage" and other times you won't. No carrier in their right mind is going to give you one of these maps, although I myself have seen them often. This detailing could lead to lynch mobs of the poor sales personnel in the malls that have no clue what RF means...
-- Friends don't let friends buy Nokia.
I used to live in an apartment less than a mile from a major mall/retail shopping area and major community college http://www.mc.maricopa.edu/. You might expect that I'd have great coverage, but this was far from the case. I had T-Mobile (Nokia 3600 el-cheapo) and could barely get signal inside the front door, calls would come in occasionally (while I was inside), but would usually end up dropping after short amount of time. This same problem happened with all of my other friends on Cricket (specifically, a roommate with nokia 5600), friends on ATT (nokia), Qwest (motorola), and just about anyone who had the misfortune of stopping by and needing to make a phone call (schedule a chron job, ahem)
Eventually, my employer sprang for a work phone, which just happened to be from Verzion. The phone was cheap ass Kyrocera (sp?), but none the less it made a world of difference. Not only could I receive and dial calls inside the apartment, but I even put it to the ultimate test. I shoved the phone under the couch (1st floor apt btw) and had someone call it from outside. Your damn right it worked. I've since moved, but none the less the service has been excellent, no delayed text messages or anything random/stupid like that. And I can't remember the last time I dropped a call (except when I went down to puerto rico, that's a whole other story).
I'd almost be willing to recommend Verzion, if it wasn't for there damn cliche spawning annoying ass commecials.
From the article: "In addition to the survey, AT&T Wireless customers who enroll in the new national plan, GSM America, as well as those already on one of the company's qualifying national GSM plans, automatically get the benefit of paying no roaming charges anywhere in the United States. " The implication is, where there's a signal, you can call. But, the truth is quite different. No charge for roaming means limited roaming. Roaming only where they have agreements in place - not everywhere there's a signal.
"I have yet to see really detailed coverage maps for cellular provided by the providers themselves; in cities especially a one-block difference can mean 3 bars of reception or none."
And chances are you never will. You must not realize how utterly ridiculous, not to mention cost prohibitive it is to put a "Can you hear me now" commercial into actual practice. Yeah, you're going to see a map displaying the dead zone between forth and main reeeeal soon.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
I work at a restaurant, and at the counter/bar part near the windows in the front I get incredible service.
When I go in the back (40ft away) to the prep area I get no service.
Funny thing is, in the front I'm on "Cingular Extend" which is just being on t-mobile's network, and in the back I'm on plain "Cingular".
When I was shopping for a new phone I was going to get a t-mobile phone but I opted for cingular with family talk and roll over instead.
Verizon get's horrible service all over the building, and I think Sprint has bad service too.
The worst, worst part, is Nextel phones work fine.
And the entire immediate surrounding area is filled with construction and landscaping companies, as well as a few factories.
Come lunch time it's a big fun fest of that freakin Nextel walkietalkie beeping noise and people yelling at their phones.
Why can AT&T suck it? Because they charge $ .02 a kilobyte for their GPRS network while killing all modem calls made on their phones. I thought I'd be able to use all those currently unused minutes while on the road, dialing up with my Bluetooth phone, but no dice! And the AT&T rep? "Uhh, you need a data plan..." "I have a data plan, but I want to use my free university dial-up instead of GPRS." "Uhh, here's an mMode brochure."
Bah.
Thanks for the MUCH-needed clarification. ;-)
T-Mobile is merely buying spectrum from Cingular on the West Coast.
.-.--
I can move around the room and I'm still dropping off. I live in a wood-frame house so I very much doubt it's metal interfering with the signal in any way, and the living room is on the main floor.
Many houses in northern climates are wood frame construction. Just because you don't have stucco doesn't mean you don't have metal shielding in the walls. Most fiberglass insulation now has a paper backed moisture barrier. For a while, most fiberglass batting and roll insulation had a paper/aluminum moisture barrier backing. This lining the walls with aluminum foil is great shielding. Only doors, windows and studs are the only openings in this aluminum box. Needless to say, high frequency radio signals inside the box is marginal at best with lots of low strength signals that are mostly multipath reflections inside the box. How is your UHF TV reception on rabbit ears in the same room? If UHF TV is full of ghosting on rabbit ears, don't expect a cell phone to not have the same signal problems.
The truth shall set you free!
Antenna size at 98MHz (FM) has to be pretty long because the waves are very long. If your antenna is less than 1/4 wave, you will get less signal.
1/4 wave at 98MHz is several feet.
Your cell phone works at 800-900MHz or even 1900MHz. At 1900MHz 1/4 wave is less than 2 inches. So you can fit an entire full-reception antenna in a cell phone.
So, it isn't really the exact same thing here.
Know how to remove piss from a swimming pool? You're welcome to try.
With the username SgtSnorkel, that's an oddly disturbing threat.
I've had AT&T here in SRQ, FL for several years.
I live 1 mile from the local airport (SRQ), as such there are few towers around, add to that a house that could double as a military bunker (3-hole cinder block throughout, rebarb included...), a shitload of computers, a WAP and AT&T wireless and I get NEARLY NO SERVICE. that is, until after today.
This afternoon, ATT service STOPPED within a 20 mile radius, now I get 3-4 bars on my V60i where 24 hours ago i got 1-2... strange.
Logistical Chaos Officer http://www.slagg.org - LAN Gaming in Sarasota FL,USA
unlimited incoming call plan (10$ a month for no limit on incoming calls and no per minute charges)
Watch your bill.
Prepare for customer service hell.
My wife signed up for an AT&T plan that included 2 phones, unlimited phone to phone, shared minutes, free weekend and evening minutes..yada..
The wife spent over 3 hours last week fighting consumer service, billing, accounts, trying to get the bill corrected. Weekend time and phone to phone time was billed. This ran over the plan total. Consumer service finaly agreed (after voice mail hell) that she was right that the included plan minutes were not supposed to be billed. Transfer over to billing and accounts was hell trying to get past "when can we expect payment to avoid disconnection?" Um what part of contested bill didn't they get. Expect the run-around. It's standard. We are looking to flee as soon as the contract is up.
Bottom line, What's your time worth? Do you want to spend it fighting billing and service problems?
We'll never get into a long term phone contract again. It's a gurantee of service. We can flee if service is bad and not be stuck in consumer service hell for years.
The truth shall set you free!
I haven't seen any maps of cellular coverage, but I've been with Verizon for years. A lot of my friends have used AT&T, Cricket, Voicestream, T-Mobile, and a couple of others. So far, I've never seen one that got as good of coverage as I do. (I should mention that I have a good-quality tri-mode phone.)
Last summer, we travelled through Illinois and D.C.. My wife and I never had a problem with our phones, coverage, or signal strength. Everyone else, not using Verizon, had nothing but dead time and problems through the entire trip. One of them had even signed up with AT&T specifically to get good coverage while travelling.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
Let me make a correction ... AT&T Wireless CLAIMS to know when there are dropped calls. They CLAIM to offer "automatic" credit. However, this credit is based on particular behavior by the user and on a restrictive definition of the problem.
In order for the user to get dropped call credit the call must be reported as ended on the user's phone and the user then must redial within a specified time, which I've been told is one minute.
The process really begs the point of what is a dropped call. Apparently, AT&T only defines a restrictive subset of call failures as "dropped calls". For instance, a call that loses audio but remains connected is not considered a dropped call. Nor is an unsuccessful call that is dialed (reporting "connected") but simply never rings. My experience is that I have had numerous one minute calls on my phone bill separated from one another by repeat attempts to get through. Seldom if ever are these dropped calls credited by AT&T Wireless. (Incidentally, I am only discussing a small subset of conditions here that constitute call failures.)
In some irate calls to AT&T I've pointed out flaws in their algorithm for determining dropped calls. I've been told that it's not done otherwise because "customers would just end up making lots of one-minute calls to get free air time." With this service I've literally lost hundreds of dollars in uncredited minutes.
Now that the contract's over I'm switching to a new provider as fast as possible. I just hope by buying AT&T that Cingular helps them improve. By the way my experiences have been with TDMA service in the greater Los Angeles area. Let me know if you need a map of the five absolute dead spots along just 15 miles of the 210 freeway that I drive every day.
I've had AT&T for 3 years now, and everything has been great, but I just moved to my parents' house and they have an aluminum roof, aluminum siding, and metal screens on all the windows. Can you say NO SIGNAL? On the upshot, the wi-fi is clean and clear throughout the house... :)
Sure, it looks cool from an image standpoint,
Why? Seriously, what's cool about having a small wireless phone? It's just a telephone. Useful at times certainly, but cool? I didn't think much of Maxwell Smart's shoe either.
/unimpressed
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
Then bend over and get a real carrier like Verizon...evil base tards
Try my dorm room at the University of Chicago. Everyone here [Max Palevsky Residential Commons] has to go outside to place or receive a call. =/
Coverage is a major problem with AT&T Wireless in the Los Angeles area. So bad, in fact, that there is a pending lawsuit about the matter, Petrove, Wireless Consumers Alliance, et. al. v. AT&T Wireless. The page has not been updated recently, but it's a live case that is working its way through the courts here. I believe they are trying for class action status if they have not been granted it already.
Basically, the case centers around alleged false advertising claims made about coverage area. I can personally tell you after being stuck with a bad contract that the AT&T coverage area sucks, as I can't drive on the freeway for more than five minutes without losing (or "dropping") a call. The page talks about one lady who was carjacked and got shot in the face after she tried to call 911 but her cell phone didn't work. About two months ago I saw an accident on the 210 Freeway where the driver was bleeding and knocked unconscious. Over the course of a few miles I must have called 911 like five times on hold, then getting cut off, then finally dialing the operator. Instead of the local city the cell operator transfered me to San Bernardino County, which is about 30 miles away, and the dispatcher asked me to try again. I had to tell him that my cell phone wasn't working so he had to make the call for me, oh, and by the way, I might get cut off again.
My whole experience with the calling areas here has been bad, but I'm not sure quite as bad as my experiences with the cellular contract that got me here in the first place. Luckily, it just expired, and I am switching carriers ASAP -- that is if AT&T has gotten its number portability together. Bad AT&T Wireless service is a common theme in the L.A. area.
Even when I DO see good signal strength, making a call will often make the signal disappear. I think what is happening is the phone is reporting that it's in communication with the cell on the control channel - but when all the signal channels are in use so you can't get a new one, the phone reports it as "service unavailable" as if it couldn't reach the cell.
If I'm not mistaken, this was due to different signal strength in downlink and uplink path from the BTS. Maybe they use different antenna for downlink and uplink and position them a little different.
It is amazing to read these dozens of posts, coming from the most industrialised country in the world, about where you can and can't call. I can drive from Northern Denmark to the south of Spain and not lose coverage once. I can phone in the tunnels in Brussels, in the Copenhagen subway, in the chunnel and on the french ski-slopes. It goes to show what happens if you don't choose a standardised solution...
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
extends for several hundred kilometers outside my town in any direction - once you're more than 20k's outside of town, you might as well turn your phone off. This is from Telstra, Australia's largest telco, who claim to cover 95+% of the population.
:-)
My phone has no reception where I work either... but that's because I work 700m underground in a lead mine, so I'll forgive them on that part
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
The biggest difference between the in-car phones compared to your cell phones is power. My sister borrowed a "bag" phone from work last time we went to the Rockies.
considering 3 of those locations are not in the city and another one is danm near not even in the state.
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
Please reference the following page: http://www.nextel.com/support/enet/index.shtml
I have used this on multiple occasions and have always found the results to be beneficial. Sometimes there is just nothing they can do, but they will explain exactly what they find to be the cause if they can and that knowledge, alone, is comforting. Regarding "drops" on freeways though, they often can resolve these with tower configuration changes if they are brought foreward.
Come play Moral Decay!
in all seriousness, I get perfectly fine receptioon in my house... except if I lie down or sit on my bed.
:-P )
WTF??
that my friends is soem screwy coverage.
so how do they go about making it so I don't drop cals when I'm answering my phone from bed? I know we've all had phone calls where youa re tired and want to lay down, but don't want to get off the phone either. (no, your 1-900 calls don't count.
"It takes a very long time to count to 2 in binary." ~'Fourlegged'
For example, I use AT&T and T-Mobile in Florida's Treasure Coast area. Last year AT&T's GSM was pretty awful, I've started trying them again and there's been a 1,000% improvement where calls connect in 2-5 seconds (previously it took 20), call quality is normal for GSM (I swear they were putting their GSM calls over their TDMA infrastructure or something like that previously), I get reception now in my appartment and at work, and calls generally seem more stable. Oh and international messaging now works (but is stupidly expensive - 25c for an SMS? That's 5 times T-Mobile's rate. Geez.)
T-Mobile's network at the same time has been rock solid though with some major dead spots. Despite this, I routinely hear complaints on Internet groups about their service.
The point is that (a) Network quality is a location dependent thing, (b) It's also a time dependent thing, they do work on problems over time. A bad operator in one area may be a terribly good one else where. AT&T is currently good on the Treasure Coast, and T-Mobile is too. Verizon and Sprint both have their problems in this area (Sprint because of capacity, Verizon's voice quality is poor, I assume they're using one of the poorer, low bit rate, vocodecs by default)
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
What do you suggest the carriers do? Eat that cost cause you were too busy downloading ringtones to see the flashing ROAMING or EXTEND on your phones screen?
...and I stopped trying to make a call within two miles of the place long ago.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Not sure if you've seen this before, but T-Mobile has a listing of all of their towers, by city. So you can see if they have towers near you...
http://www.tmobiletowers.com/
I think my principles are reachin' an all time low
AT&T is one of the worse cellular providers in my area. Southern Linc/Nextel is the worst - when the linc is down the cellular part doesn't work either (no service!). Verizon and Tracfone are the best for reception in most areas except Tracfone doesn't work south of West Palm Beach FL. and not at all around the Ft Lauderdale Pompano, and Miami areas. All are rip-offs!
I am still with Sprint despite its failings. Coverage can be spotty particularly when compared to Verizon. However, Verizon messaging system has degraded further from its already low standards (East Coast U.S.).
When I had their service I would get messages (unpredicatively) days late from clients. Each time I would inquire about it - first there would be denial then: '... Next time check with us.'. Not very helpful. I knew immediately they were days late because the day if not the time of the message was 'stamped' on each message. Three days late when it happened was not unusual.
Verizon no longer day stamps the messages - one urgent message was received about a week late. However, those receiving the message no longer have any way of knowing when the message was left.
Good going Verizon - maybe for family use, but not business.
Now that so many phones have gps capability, why not add a feature where the phone reports its location and signal strength (anonymously) to a central server periodically. Then "real time" results can be displayed on a map online.
If God had had a computer it would have taken him 7 months to create the earth...if he even bothered to do it at all.
I've been an ATTWireless customer in so cal for 4 years. About 2 years ago when I switched the the "better" GSM network their service was horrible and still is today. Those commericals where they advertise better coverage friggin piss me off so damn much that I tell this story EVERY time it comes on. I drive 11 miles to work every day on a regular street, not a freeway/highway. There are no large buildings around. I like to make calls on my 45 minute drive to and from work because it passes the time. However, att's service would constantly drop my calls or not allow them to connect. I called their customer service line 18 times reporting the problems and all they could tell me was to give them the cross streets and they would fix it. I finally spent 2 hours literally mapping out the dead zones in this 11 mile, 4 city trek between here and work. I found 30 dead spots and I mapped them well with cross streets or addresses. I then called up and asked to get an email address to forward them to and was given one. i was told that i had such horrible problems that they were going fix the problems within 90 days. 3 months later, nothing, not 1 dead spot was fixed. They were so reliable that I kept the map in my car and would try to talk "around" them. i.e. "gotta-go-dead-spot-comin-CLICK, redial, hey-its-me-CLICK". Once I started complainig, i would get horrible bills with just rediculous mistakes. Like, "oh, it says here you're not on the 600 minute plan, you're on the 20 minute plan with no free weekends?". I would get bills at $400 dollars at some time. My g/f can tell you that she could guaruntee I would be on the phone for 2 horus at night on the 15th when the bill came in every month. It was a joke and yet they wouldn't let me out of my contract. I finally said screw it and set my plan to $20/month cheapest and switched my phone to t-mobile. Not only can i make calls that span the entire 45 minutes across the 11 mile stretch but i can use it in places i never even thought i trying at att. Their coverage is awesome (which is actually cingular's cell sites)! Last month my contrat was finally about to end with att. So I put in my att sim card and made that call to 611. While on hold i was dropped. Called back and got a person, dropped before i could tell them i need to cancel. 3rd call dropped before i could press a number. This is not in the same place but as I'm travelling! Called again, explainied that I want to cancel, no i dont wanna reconsider, no you don't have better coverage now (are f*cking kidding me?), i want to ca-CLICK ...dropped. I finally had to call using my work phone as THEIR SERVICE IS SO BAD THAT I COULD NOT EVEN CANCEL MY DAMN SERVICE USING THEIR WIRELESS SERVICE!
As of this month my service is done but I would not put it past them to send me another bill, maybe for a couple thousand dollars, why not, they're a bunch of asses over there who don't take care of their so.cal customers - at least. please, do yourself a favor, DO NOT GET ATT if you live in southern california (or probably anywhere else).
netkev.com
Well, they're losing me as a customer. Portland, OR, with a multi-band GSM phone. It's unusable at home (about 4 miles from the centre of Portland), and drops out in multiple other places. Far from improving, service seems to have deteriorated over the last year. Oh, and their voice prices are not good and the data plan is ludicrous.
I'm switching to T-mobile. Reception is in a different class (already tested with a friend's phone), unlimited data plan for $19.99 a month etc. etc. AT&T/Cingular need to get a serious clue or they're going to have no customers left. They already lost a huge number late last year after their system upgrade disaster.
'tis a pity. When I first used them back in the mid 90s, they offered a decent service at a reasonable price. Sadly no longer.
GSM has lower voice quality than TDMA.
I've found the opposite to be true. Half a year ago my girlfriend switched from TDMA to a 1900MHz GSM phone. The sound quality was much improved but still not great. A month ago I switched from TDMA to an 850-1800-1900MHz tri-band GSM phone. The sound was even better than my girlfriend's. Since the switch I've had several people ask if I'm on a land line.
If you're looking to upgrade, make sure your provider and phone are capable of 850MHz. The lower frequency sounds much better, even indoors.
If only quad-band 850-900-1800-1900 phones were more widely available.
N. Denmark to S. Spain, would be approxiamately Maine to FL, on I-95, where coverage is 99%.
Listen, Europe is smaller than the US. Europe is also more centralized.
We can't trust a survey released by a carrier to be published in a way that gives the whole picture.
From the article: "For example, we have provided our customers access to more than 440 new cell sites in the last 6 months here in the greater Chicago area."
Interesting choice of words there. "provided our customers access to". That looks like it means (but hides the fact that) they are including partnerships with other providers. So yes, customers have access, but (unsaid) they might have to pay hefty roaming charges to actually use that access.
Skagen, Denmark to Algeciras, Spain is only ~2100 miles (~3400km) driving, but in that drive you've gone through some of the largest population centers in Europe. Travelling that far in the US won't even get you from Seattle to Chicago, and that drive includes some of the most godforsaken empty land you've ever seen (Wall Drug, anyone?).
It's simply more of a challange to balance coverage over such a large area. Granted, you'd think that they'd be able to cover downtown Chicago pretty well, but then that takes capital away from the buildout covering the 50 families in Cerro Gordo.
If you want an in-depth and exact answer.... I have the answers and need the money. Hire me!
I had a bunch of resumes out with my cell number on them. (And I really didn't want to punch my whole address book into a new phone!)
If you were with a GSM provider, I presume you could have kept your number when transferring to another provider via a PAC (Port Authorization Code). At least you can do that here in the UK - I recently did it.
As for putting the phonebook into a new phone, well... that's maybe a one-hour job at worst, and if you buy a new phone that has connectivity to a computer, you can probably start synchronizing the phonebook that way instead.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
And most people who bought cell-phones in the last two years have GSM.
I also had an analog, TDMA phone once. The only dead spot I ever found was in the top of a huge mountain (the oh-so-famous Sugar Loaf/Pao de Açucar).
Um, did I mention even the poorest brazilians own cellphones?
It's somewhat amusing how americans have such superior internet connectivity compared to us, but have such issues with mobile telephony. Perhaps there's a market failure to be investigated there.
Bend over and I'll show you beeyotch
ummm - I think the issue is that he does not want to upgrade. The lack of coverage is forcing him to upgrade.
In my mind, if the phone company decides to upgrade their sites to different technology, they should either upgrade their customer's phones to match for free - or buy out their remaining contract (which monies could then be used to upgrade or move to another carrier that does have the old technology that matches their current phones).
Phones are a big investment; pulling the rug out from under the customer is not a good business plan - particularly with the various mobile phone companies out there.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
Back in the day, my big brother built a very nice parabolic reflector from a snow saucer (the kind you slide down hills on) - IIRC he had to bang it a bit to get a better parabola, but not much. Then he mounted a mike at the focal point. We could hear the college kids talking in their dorm rooms, 1/4 mile away.
I would think something like this would work for cellphones. Use one of the passive repeater ideas listed elsewhere, mounting one of the antennae at the focal point (so you don't have to WEAR the dang thing to talk on the phone!)
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
One small correction. I think you mean "GSM has lower voice quality than IS-136."
IIRC, They're both TDMA systems.
Quad-band phones are becoming available these days- NEC 515/525 on ATTWS, Moto v.600, etc. AWE and Cingular both use GSM 850/1900. T-Mobile is the only provider that has a 1900-only network, as that's the only thing they have licenses for in many areas.
Sorry, my karma just ran over your dogma.
GSM has lower voice quality than TDMA[sic]
One small correction. I think you mean "GSM has lower voice quality than IS-136."
IIRC, They're both TDMA systems.
I believe that's correct.
However, in common usage when speaking about cellphone systems, "TDMA" refers to the specific earlier non-GSM system only, rather than to the class of all TDMA technologies, while GSM is referred to by its own name regardless of whether its underlying technology is a member of the class of TDMA systems.
The system called TDMA is the first deployed member of the class of all TDMA systems, while later systems get their own names. When there was only one, the generic was adequate - now that there are more you need additional names.
I'm reminded of "IBM Machines" - back when mainframes were pretty close to all the commercial general-purpose computers there were and IBM made essentially all of them.
Or of the singer formerly known as "Prince". B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
DEpending on the model of the phone, there is a way to add an external antenna on the inside. I kow if I take of the back cover of my Nokia, there's a hole and a plug suitable for a N-Type pigtail connector.
You've made a couple very critical errors in your post. The modem phone call does not follow the same route through the switch. If you grab an older CDPD phone (aka 2 or 2.5G...before 3G) and connect it to your laptop, install the software to use it as a modem, you'll note it's dialing #777. This tells the switch how to treat the incoming call. The call BYPASSES the vocoders (the "voice mangler" you referred to) and goes out a T1 to a tall cabinet, which I learned to hate with a passion. These piece of $h1t boxes are the only ones we allowed through the door with a Windows OS. I managed, back then, about 200-300 servers, which were all the servers in Sprint PCS Lucent-switched markets, nationwide. These damn windows boxes hung all the time. The cabinet has two Edgeservers (one for each half of the "shelf"), which is basicly a Windows/Intel machine in a single card/slot. There were about 8-10 modem bank cards which passed up to four CPDP (circuit data, packet data) calls per card.
You were correct about the painful speeds. We were still limited to the old 56k standards established when we were all in preschool.
Sorry if I sounded pissy in the beginning. I just got through MetaModding and couldn't believe the number of BS posts modded "Interesting", especially the ones which were pure conjecture and obviously wrong to anyone intiated in the subject. No, your's wasn't a case of this, but I was still irritated, nonetheless.