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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!"
Go, go gadget grocery getter.
The preceding message was based on actual events. Only the names, locations and events have been changed.
Wardriving.
Best, wardriving vehicle, ever.
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.
Life is not for the lazy.
Slashdot: Nothing to see here, move along
Almost makes Verizon seem like the good one ;)
What's the old joke? - "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon carrying magtapes".
If you don't want crime to pay, let the government run it.
I can see where my nextel drops me everyday on the way home on 275 talking to my wife. Seriously.
/me calls verizon.
Continually saying "Can you hear me now" has to violate some sort of OSHA regs, never mind those states with laws about talking on a cell phone while driving.
I used to work at Motorola and we would, at times, have to bring an entire debugging setup out in the field. A van, with the phone test board, workstation, and logic analyzer all hooked up.
A friend of mine does the same thing, except he works for Nextel. Needless to say, the job is quite boring.
Uh no, not inside a building.
That's why I no longer have Verizon. Who cares if some jackass on a commercial can talk when he's in Death Valley...I couldn't get a signal inside. Now with my Sprint phone, at least I get one bar, which is just enough to get calls and head for the window. Verizon has nothing on Sprint or Nextel, both of which consistantly get better service here in Michigan. (at least for everyone I know)
Although, you can't pick up chicks in a tank.
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.)
Have you Meta Moderated t
Yeah, but does the wireless tester have SPINNERS on it?
I hate those things....
All that equipment but the guy really hoped that MTV and Xzibit would Pimp His Ride!!!
... so I can take the karma hit of being a Grammar Nazi asshole.
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 ;-)
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
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.
...the tester gets a skewed view because he uses equipment worth 3/4 million whereas real users have to use a crappy phone that costs a few hundred.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
"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.
A lot of that depends on your phone too. I know that my flip-phone doesn't get great reception in the local mall, whereas friends with a standard nokia phone can manage in many places I can't.
Also, anyone who tells you it's the fashizzle is just lying to your facizzle.
Also, anyone who trys to tell me what to think is gonna be ignored. I can make my own decisions, thankyouverymuch, and so can the mods.
Ok, what the fuck is an .amr file?
They've put up a shitload more antennas. It's interesting that people haven't noticed, because they've been camoflauged.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
No, he's talking about that Napolean Dyn-o-mite!
The one that starred Jimmy Walker.
Get your Unix fortune now!
Um... are you sure its a good idea to publish a pic with the license plate number of a car carrying $750 000 worth of stuffZors?
Patent: from Latin patere, to be open
I hope that wagon's got airbags, because the driver's gotta be drinking heavily during his job.
most of the equipment looks like it analyzes and stores information from the phones...
if you actually RTFA and looked at the pictures would see a bunch of expensive equipment plugged into 4 different phones (one for each different company)
he doesn't have any special external antennas to boost the signal or skew the results.
the only possible thing i could think of is the phones may be getting a WORSE signal because they are all lying down inside of a metal case...
Can you hear me now? ... ... ...
Hello?
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
The test took place in the middle of the summer, during probably the hottest two weeks of the whole season and the whole city was totally empty, dead, void of people. People went to the beach, parks and on vacation while I was testing the "peak hours". Most of the tests completed without any errors so it wasn't a really succesful assignment unless you count the nice tan I got from it :)
"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.
http://www.archive.org/details/ThePowerOfNightmares
It seems like a lifetime ago, but I guess it was only about 11 or so years ago, I worked for a wireless engineering consultant firm in Arlington, VA. Among our many projects, one of the biggest during my time there was designing and building out the first Sprint PCS systems in DC, Seattle, and Portland.
We didn't own the vans we did drive testing in (the process of checking the signal by driving around with special equipment and software). We rented them. That was fun. We'd rent a nice brand new minivan from Budget or some car rental place and the first thing we'd do is rip out the dash board so we could run power cables to the alternator (I assume that's where they were plugging in. I dealt more with the software side).
In addition to some fairly expensive equipment, some of which our company designed, we also had specially modded PCS phones that, with a serial cable, would provide signal strength and other information to the computers.
We'd have maybe 3 or 4 laptops, each with a phone and GPS attached, and then we'd just go cruising around town recording signal strength, intereference measurements, and so on.
And if it wasn't just plain old geeky fun, the young engineers involved were simply a great group of people and we had a blast doing it together. And somehow we usually managed to get the minivans put back together well enough that we never got sued.
Thanks for the memories. I haven't thought about the old drive testing days in quite some time.
Some college students started doing this already, but want to provide it to the public. http://www.signalmaps.com
It paid $15/hour, which I thought was great. I mean, all I have to do is drive, right? Well, when hours are from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m., and you factor in the potential cost of meals and lodging... Not to mention the fact that sitting in one precise position for that long is KILLER... I drove 550 miles in one day, and didn't actually end up going anywhere, because we just drove every road back and forth to cover an entire area. I don't think I was ever more than 30 miles from where I started. It's really crippling, psychologically, to be all "Wow, I can't wait 'til we get there!" because you feel like you're on a road trip. And then you realize... "Oh yeah... I'm just gonna end up back where I started." After a while, it was pretty enjoyable though, because I went nuts and was entertained by everything I saw on the side of the road.
Didn't really learn much as far as wireless goes, though I talked to the engineer a lot... Long car trips not to. Here's what I don't get...
Sprint wants to test their cell reception and compare it to their competitors... They hire company A to do it. Company A calls Company B for staffing. Company A pays Company B, and Engineer is hired, and paid by Company B. Company B then calls Company C to inquire about a drive. Company B pays Company C, and Company C find and pays the drive. Turning in hours was maddening. And think about how freaking expensive these drives are when you figure that everyone is making a profit in that multi-tiered platform. Sheesh!
P.S... Normally, the signs say "Watch For Children". But there were a few in the Blacksburg area I think that said "Watch Children". I was quite disappointed when I didn't see kids on the side of the road twirling plates, juggling chainsaws, and performing magic tricks for my entertainment.
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.
WarDrive Van
Now that's what I call geek!
I'd like to see them air a commercial from the point of view of the poor guy stuck at his desk all day...
"....yes....yes....yes....yes....yes....yes...."
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.
We can believe in you for 3 minutes, but beyond that, even the King of All Cosmos can't be expected to wait.