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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.
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.
But I can show you my 0-face!
:-()
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
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
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Unknown host pong.
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?
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... --
Do you have a stucco exterior on your house? I had good reception with Verizon in my dad's house in Jacksonville until he had his walls stuccoed. The metal frame used to attach the stucco degrades the signal to the point where my phone is unusable inside but I get awesome reception by stepping out to the back yard.
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 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 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... :-)