Ride Along With a Real Verizon Wireless Tester

jonknee writes "So you're probably sick of the Can you hear me now? ads, but here's a new article about a real-life Verizon Wireless network tester. This guy logs over 3,000 miles a month in a station wagon decked out with over a quarter-million dollars worth of network gear (I dare say the most valuable station wagon ever?). An audio file is linked at the bottom of the article that has a few minute sample of the audio Verizon tests with. It's bizarre!"

Comments

As a customer

[DigiShaman]

I'm very happy with my cell service. I guess they really *are* doing something abount reception. Honestly, this is the best cell service I've had in terms of voice quality.

Note: I live in Austin, TX. So your MMV.

Re:As a customer

[Skater]

I happen to be in Buckhannon, WV, and I only barely have service. The only way I got a reliable 1-bar signal was to go outside, so I turned the phone off entirely.

This is the first time I've had this problem with Verizon, though.

I saw a sign in town for another service provider that said, "What good are the minutes if you don't have service?" I guess they're aware of the problem Verizon has here and ready to take advantage!

Harvard Sentences

[eltoyoboyo]

The Harvard Sentences used to test, that are mentioned in the article, seem to be missing a key phrase:

I had an idea that we parked our car in the Harvard Yard.

(Boston Dialect article here or here.)

sigh - I've had a bad day...

[cliveholloway]

... so I can take the karma hit of being a Grammar Nazi asshole.

...the article that has a few minute sample...

So, is that meant to be a sample that is a few minutes long, or are their several tiny (minute) samples?

FFS, *somebody* buy the slashdot editors a copy of StyleWriter.

cLive ;-)

Down already

[numLocked]

The site is down already, and i saw someone requesting a mirror, so if anyone doesn't know about it, www.mirrordot.com mirrors everything slashdot links to. I've never seen it go down.

Dropped Calls

[bleckywelcky]

"Dropped calls for Verizon Wireless are pretty rare these days, with some months of testing seeing none."

Well that's all fine and dandy for them. Unfortunately, I get a dropped call or two each week, in an area Verizon advertises as being completely covered.

Re:Dropped Calls

[Anonymous Coward]

> "Dropped calls for Verizon Wireless are pretty rare these days"

As a Verizon customer, I can honestly say that that idiot is full of crap. I use my phone in three different cities about 20 hours each week, and more often than not, my calls end before either one of us hangs-up. I've used seven different phones over the past two years so I know it's not the phone.

I really miss my Sprint analog phone. I used it about 50 hours a month in 1993, and while I did have dropped calls, they were always due to lack of signal. You knew why they happened and the static was a good warning that it was coming. With Verizon, I can be, like at my house, 500 yards from where two major interstates cross, and I still get dropped calls. At my office in Charlotte, NC, Verizon's tower is about 100' from our building, but Verizon still drops about 75% of the calls over two minutes long that our employees make. With our office in Greenville, SC and the other in Spartanburg, SC, they have even worse luck with Verizon. Verizon is a omplete joke.

Re:Dropped Calls

[nxtw]

As a Verizon customer, I can honestly say that that idiot is full of crap.

Your experience is very subjective. A low quality or defective phone can cause a myriad of problems. Early Motorola V600s had numerous issues regarding static and choppy calls; later ones don't have these issues. All opinions for wireless networks are extremely subjective. Reports on wireless networks in different areas should not be compared (e.g. because Verizon sucks in one city does not mean they suck across the country. Each individual network (e.g. one system for one carrier in one city/area) is built differently, may be licensed differently, and was built at a different time than another. Ameritech (now Cingular's) original network was built here in 1996; today, it has evolved through at least two (possibly three or four) different technologies. This network would be expected to have more coverage than T-Mobile's network, which was built in 2002, but less than Verizon or Alltel's networks, which were built before 1990. In some other cities, Cingular's network has been around since the 80s, and Verizon's is less than ten years old. Wireless experiences are specific to your specific location -- at most, a major metropolitan area or small state. Many cellphones suck or are defective or have subtle flaws that only are revealed in specific situations -- so unless your experiences are common between other people with different phone models in the same location, don't treat them like complete gospel.

I really miss my Sprint analog phone. I used it about 50 hours a month in 1993, and while I did have dropped calls, they were always due to lack of signal.

That network is no longer owned by Sprint. That network could even be Verizon's network now...

Re:Download the track?

[keeleysam]

Extension: AMR Program and/or Extension Function Company Adaptive Multi-Rate Codec Specific Notes Speech encoding format used in GSM telephony. MIME Type What's This? File Classification Associated Links * Player * Background Paper Identifying Characters: Hex: 23 21 41 4D 52 0A 34 ASCII: #!AMR.4

Re:Download the track?

[baconbit]

You can open it with QuickTime.

Re:No wonder their service sucks...

[Anonymous Coward]

Driving around with a cell phone will tell you you're losing your signal.

Driving around with an HP 8563 spectrum analyzer and a standard-gain antenna will tell you why you're losing your signal.

This is sorta important if you're in the cell-phone business.

AMR Codecs

[Kjellander]

Use Realplayer 10.0.2 under linux. https://helixcommunity.org/download.php/806/hxplay -1.0.2.tar.bz2

For Win32 there is a decoder with source but I haven't tested it. http://www.voiceage.com/codecsite/openinit_amr.php

Or you can copy it to a recent Nokia phone and listen to it

Re:Bah

[dpete4552]

"Oh and why is it again its gonna cost me 4 bills for a phone with bluetooth that marginally works with my car?"

The Motorola v710 isn't the only bluetooth phone on Verizon and on top of bluetooth it has an MP3 player, memory card slot, huge TFT screen with equally large resolution -- inside and out, and pretty much every feature you could imagine having on a cell phone that isn't a PDA phone. That is what you're paying $400 for. There are cheaper bluetooth phones.

Re:Download the track?

[rizzo420]

RTFA... it says you can open it with quicktime.

Some College Students Tried This Already

[usdrowe]

Some college students started doing this already, but want to provide it to the public. http://www.signalmaps.com

Capacity, not coverage problem.

[katharsis83]

Verizon has serious problems with their cell phone service, and they're testing for it the wrong way. Verizon has excellent coverage in the SF Bay Area - I can get 5-bars of service almost everywhere I go; I can even sometimes get text messages underground on BART.

The problem Verizon has is capacity; they've over-booked each of their cell phone towers. I'm not sure but I think most CDMA towers for Verizon can handle 80-100 simultaneous calls, and this gets to be a real problem in densely packed metropolitan areas. I get 5-bars of reception, but I can't place any calls, or they get dropped within 1-2 minutes of connecting. Sometimes it takes 2-3 minutes just to connect when I dial. They need to stop this crap about super-coverage when their capacity sucks donkey nuts.

This is making me consider switching over to AT&T, but their "New Every 2" plan is coming up for me soon. Does anyone here have experience in the Bay Area with AT&T service? I used to have them in their TDMA days, but switched to Verizon ~2 years ago.

Re:Can you hear me now?

[LinuxHam]

The coverage sucks, and frequently cuts out.

Remember.. if you get close to going over your minutes, get in the habit of calling VZW to report each dropped call soon after it happens. Every carrier will take dropped calls off your bill. Each time the call drops, just call customer service and tell them "yeah, the last call I was just on dropped on me. I want those minutes credited back." If everyone did that all the time, I'm sure they'd get sick of it and start addressing the problems.

On a side note, Nextel has been doing some pretty sucky things trying to boost my bills. They recently "accidentally" deleted unlimited nationwide DC and they reactivated it seconds later less my free nights & weekends. My bill jumped from $82 to ~$400. I called and got the excess charges reversed, but had to get 200 more minutes on a new contract (for the same cost) and restart my contract clock. They've tried to delete my 100 bonus minutes in the past to my objections since it comes with my corporate discount.

Harvard Sentences

[plimsoll]

After I heard the Verizon Wireless testing audio track linked in TFA I had to google the surrealist sentences they chose. I stumbled upon the weird-ass Harvard Psychoacoustic Sentence List, and I don't know which is stranger; the official test sentences or the unofficial ones they added themselves.

Here are the first 20 sentences of the test, noting the gender of the reader and the stanza:

F[H21/08]: (unintelligible) taught the new maid to serve.
M[H06/03]: Adding fast leads to wrong sums.
M[H06/04]: The show was a flop from the very start.
F[ ???? ]: There was water in the cellar after the heavy rain
F[ ???? ]: They're not listed in the new phone book.
M[H01/10]: A large size in stockings is hard to sell.
M[H01/06]: The juice of lemons makes fine punch.
F[H39/07]: Smoke poured out of every crack.
F[H39/08]: Serve the hot rum to the tired heroes.
M[H07/10]: Those words were the cue for the actor to leave.
M[H08/01]: A yacht slid around the point into the bay.
F[H10/05]: The play seems dull and quite stupid.
F[H11/06]: Thieves who rob friends deserve jail.
M[H06/01]: The frosty air passed through the coat.
M[H06/02]: The crooked maze failed to fool the mouse.
F[H21/09]: He wrote his last novel there at the inn.
F[H21/10]: Even the worst will beat his low score.
M[H06/05]: A saw is a tool used for making boards.
M[H06/06]: The wagon moved on well oiled wheels.
F[H24/01]: Try to have the court decide the case.

That's just weird (in a Conet Project sort of way)!

Re:Must. Resist. Urge. To. Attack. Oh, what the he

[BarryNorton]

Why is it you never have mod points on the days when you just HAVE to have them?? Grrrrr....

Because you use them to enforce your opinions on movies and get meta-modded down?

Nextel repeaters

[Aero]

Can't speak for Sprint, but Nextel offers repeaters, and they're the only reason why we get coverage inside the glass-steel-and-concrete cage that I work in. Before they got installed, you couldn't get a signal if you were more than 15 feet away from an exterior wall. That doesn't mean I like the service (I don't), but certain departments that I work with are absolutely in love with the rassa-sassa-frassin' PTT function (and have too many people who will ramble on and on for minutes at a time over a half-duplex link, with the recipient literally being unable to get a word in edgewise) and won't give it up.