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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.
if this going to be really useful (and not just a lame showy gimmick), AT&T had better generalize these results nationwide.
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??
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.
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...
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... --
Where I live, Sprint used to have this territory marked on its maps as a no service zone. They've since moved into town... but are having an awfully tough time convincing people to even set foot in their stores. The impression of being a zero-service carrier in this area is just plain a hard one to shake.
Afterall, it's hard to market an image that says "We're improving."... just saying that implies that you weren't always perfect and that you still aren't.
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.
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
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I got my first cell phone about two months ago, and I went with tmobile. What a mistake that was. The coverage in upstate New York is horrible, unless you're inside of the city limits of Buffalo or Rochester. I am now jealous of my friends, who have Verizon, and pay as much as I do and get twice the number of minutes, but more important, service wherever they go. As soon as I leave any of the major interstates, I'm out of luck and have no service.
Fuck tmobile if you live in NY, go with Verizon or ANYONE but Tmobile. Learn from my mistake.
I think Verizon is the only company with reception in the DC metro system, not sure if it is because of some exclusive licensing or if they are the only ones who have put up antennas there. I have Verizon and get pretty decent reception throughout my normal work commute (Blue and Orange lines), although there is one or two spots where I have dropped calls.
"I have a porkchop, you have a porkchop. I have a veal, you have a veal".
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.
Sprint PCS is a terrible service if you don't live in a large metropolis or suburb. Here in the Southern Colorado area, it works well along the 25 freeway (major N-S interstate) and the 70 (major E-W, with access to the ski resorts), but venture more than 20 miles from either, and your signal strength drops to zero. I can't wait till both cellular service and boadband are orbiting high overhead and cheap enough for the average joe to afford.
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... :-)
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.
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!
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... :)
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.
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