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.

Comments

Happenstance

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

report = load of crap.

[robdeadtech]

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.

Um, duh?

[baldmaggots]

AT&T drops calls? What? And they drop calls in Chicago's airports? Duh! numpeople>numcellchannels -> dropped calls. Why is this news again?

Re:Crappy reception in my pants

[Anonymous Coward]

I use AT+T Wireless. I'm learning to talk fast -- most of my calls over 5 minutes get dropped. Since their "big network upgrade" -- which was merging their towers with Cingular, btw -- it has not only gotten worse, but by dialing the customer service number "611", I can only talk to Cingular and not AT+T....

Guess I'm getting a new phone company in November. and it ain't gonna be Cingular!

dropped calls != poor reception

[tofu2go]

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).

Analog had many advantages...

[Anonymous Coward]

Better sound quality, higher powered transportables, far fewer dead zones, true nationwide coverage; it's no wonder they're doing away with it!

Re:My D-Spot

[merdaccia]

It's fun to press the button and watch people STFU and drive.

Don't you mean say "hello" a few times, look at their phone to see if they have signal, redial the number, wonder why they don't connect, look at the phone some more, go through a few menus to pull up a different number for the same person, try to call again, look at the phone one more time, and then maybe give up? Yeah, that makes an already bad situation much safer. It's one thing to jam the annoying bitch standing next to you in line ... but fuck with the morons on the road and you're asking to get yourself or someone else rear ended.

Re:Home Cellular Repeater - Cheap!!

[Mister Transistor]

It will work if you use 1.8 GHz antennas! I don't know if they make mobile antennas for that band, but if they're available, they should work. Maybe some Wi-Fi antennas might work, but they're pretty far from the 2.4 GHz band.

The co-ax losses will be significantly higher at the higher frequencies, though.

What they don't say

[ctwxman]

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.

Re:My D-Spot

[kubrick]

It's a Darwinian thing. Maybe a Zen thing, too. If you're talking on the phone, talk on the phone. If you're driving, drive. If you mix the two, expect to get sideswiped by an eighteen-wheeler.