Nexus One Owners Report Spotty 3G Signals On T-Mobile

rsk writes "One of the most popular questions on the Google Nexus One support forums is the 'Spotty 3G?' thread with almost 700 posts of users complaining about their 3G signal coverage fluctuating up, down, and between EDGE/3G with the phone just sitting on the desk or compared to other 3G devices on the T-Mobile network that don't offer the same unpredictable behavior. One workaround that seems to fix the issue is forcing the phone into '3G' or 'WCDMA Only' mode. This is a bit of a downer given that T-Mobile just finished their 3G upgrade to 7.2Mbps. Official word from Google is 'We are investigating this issue....'"

Comments

Spotty 3G on T-Mobile?

[dgatwood]

No, really?

Have you seen their coverage maps? They make AT&T look good.

Re:Spotty 3G on T-Mobile?

[RobertB-DC]

No, really?

Have you seen their coverage maps? They make AT&T look good.

I <3 T-Mobile, but their coverage has always been an unattractive shade of Suck. Even in Dallas -- home of Texas Instruments, y'all -- my cheap touchscreen is constantly switching from 3G to EDGE, or dropping data altogether. Hearing that Nexus One users are having trouble with T-Mobile's 3G network is like hearing that bears have been discovered crapping in the woods.

Re:Spotty 3G on T-Mobile?

[jittles]

I actually had the same problem with my iPhone 3G until the 3.0 OS update came out. I was lucky to have any signal at my desk sometimes. Updated to 3.0 and suddenly I had full bars. Hopefully this is a software issue on the Nexus too.

Re:Spotty 3G on T-Mobile?

[skirtsteak_asshat]

Then the other guy came out with a reliable, fast network. Were we scared? Hell, no. Because we hit back with a little thing called 3G. That's three G's and a touch pad. For touching. But you know what happened next? Shut up, I'm telling you what happened—the bastards went to four G's. Now we're standing around with our cocks in our hands, selling three G's and a touchpad. Touching or no, suddenly we're the chumps. Well, fuck it. We're going to five G's. Sure, we could go to four G's next, like the competition. That seems like the logical thing to do. After all, three worked out pretty well, and four is the next number after three. So let's play it safe. Let's make a bigger screen and call it the 3G Turbo. Why innovate when we can follow? Oh, I know why: Because we're a business, that's why! Stop. I just had a stroke of genius. Are you ready? Open your wallets, baby birds, cause Mama's about to drop you one sweet, fat nightcrawler: $40 Data plans. You think it's crazy? It is crazy. But I don't give a shit. From now on, we're the ones who have the edge in the cell phone game. We make the rules. What part of this don't you understand? If two G's is good, and three G's is better, obviously five G's would make us the best fucking network that ever existed. Comprende? We didn't claw our way to the top of the network game by clinging to the two-G industry standard. We got here by taking chances. Well, five G's is the biggest chance of all. Here's the report from Engineering. Someone put it in the bathroom: I want to wipe my ass with it. They don't tell me what to invent—I tell them. And I'm telling them to stick two more G's in there. I don't care how. Make the clients so thin they're invisible. Put some on the handle. I don't care if they have to cram the fifth G in perpendicular to the other four, just do it! You're taking the "fast" part of "fast network" too literally, grandma. Cut the strings and soar. Let's hit it. Let's roll. This is our chance to make network history. Let's dream big. All you have to do is say that five G's can happen, and it will happen. If you aren't on board, then fuck you. And if you're on the board, then fuck you and your father. People said we couldn't go to three. It'll cost a fortune to manufacture, they said. Well, we did it. Now some egghead in a lab is screaming "Five's crazy?" Well, perhaps he'd be more comfortable in the labs at Norelco, working on fucking electrics. Rotary phones, my white ass! Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe we should just ride in Bic's wake and make pens. Ha! Not on your fucking life! The day I shadow a penny-ante outfit like Bic is the day I leave the phone game for good, and that won't happen until the day I die! The market? Listen, we make the market. All we have to do is put her out there with a little jingle. It's as easy as, "Hey, browsing with anything less than five G's is like scraping your beard off with a dull hatchet." Or "You'll be so well-connected, I could snort lines off of your chin." Try "Your wallet is going to be so friggin' soft, someone's gonna walk up and tie a goddamn Cub Scout kerchief under it." I know what you're thinking now: What'll people say? Mew mew mew. Oh, no, what will people say?! Grow the fuck up. When you're on top, people talk. That's the price you pay for being on top. Which AT&T is, always has been, and forever shall be, Amen, sweet Jesus in heaven.

Re:Spotty 3G on T-Mobile?

[dgatwood]

I remember reading about that iPhone problem. I suspect that it's a bug in the stock firmware for that chipset and that this is another one of those obnoxious flaws in the way the chipset vendors handle patches. As I understand it from talking to some cell phone engineers, when you start out with a chipset, you get a standard copy of the baseband firmware from the chipset manufacturer. I'll call that the baseline version. Patches from clients for cell firmware end up going into a separate tree for that specific client and are not typically propagated back upstream to the baseline, so every phone manufacturer who develops a phone using any given chipset ends up having to find and fix the same set of hundreds of baseband bugs over and over. If that's true, I'm amazed that the cell manufacturers put up with it. That certainly explains why cell phones have so many hundreds (or thousands) of baseband crasher bugs, and it also probably explains why Google is having to relearn all the stuff that Apple just learned a few months ago, and probably Nokia learned a few months before that, and so on.

Sad, really. Everyone suffers because of corporate paranoia and overly strong copyright protection on minor source code patches. Were the firmware an open source project, cellular communications would be in much better shape. Of course, the telecoms are terrified of that because then people would be running rogue baseband firmware, and the tower baseband software probably isn't much more robust than the cell phone baseband software is, so once again, corporate paranoia results in a poor customer experience. And to some degree, the cell companies probably like it this way because it makes it harder for new competitors to build phones that work.

I'm so glad I don't work in telecom. *sigh*

Re:Spotty 3G on T-Mobile?

[bytethese]

You ballsack T-Mobile?

I ballsack them too, my Blackberry for work has THE worst coverage. It makes my iPhone 3GS look good.

Re:Spotty 3G on T-Mobile?

[ppanon]

And to some degree, the cell companies probably like it this way because it makes it harder for new competitors to build phones that work.

This.

In fact the current state you describe is almost certainly due to cell manufacturers. It's not just about barriers to entry but also about competitive advantage. Otherwise the first adopters of new chips would spend lots of money on bug fixing in development. In contrast, their competitors would be able to release shortly afterwards with the shared firmware bug fixes and price their product lower because they wouldn't need to amortize the debugging costs that the first mover had to absorb. A manufacturer would only let that happen to them once, then they would find another supplier that didn't work that way. It's an interesting variant on the tragedy of the commons.

Re:Spotty 3G on T-Mobile?

[hazydave]

This IS a real problem. And no one really talks about this.. except maybe Verizon, because they largely don't have it.

Ok.. set the way-back machine to the dawn of cellular phone technology. It was all AMPS, the original analog phone service. And it was 850MHz in the USA, 900MHz in Europe, deal done. Each area could support two cellular providers on that band, period. In the USA, one was usually Verizon (and, to a small extent, the companies Verizon sucked up over the years), the other was probably AT&T (and likewise).

Now, even in this, Verizon was doubly blessed. For one, they started with CDMA, they use CDMA today. Second, the CDMA 3G technology, EvDO, works in the same bandwidth (down to 2.5MHz.. 1.25MHz up, 1.25MHz down) as plain old voice. So every Verizon cell is a 3G cell. Sure, you lose 3G at the fringes, or sometimes when a particular cell is busy, but that's that. And they have the advantage of an 850MHz slot, which means, much more range for the same power. And it works much better in rain, and much, much better through forests and walls. Of course, Verizon also has 1900MHz (1800MHz in Europe) like everyone else.

AT&T Mobility was successful, but not Verizon successful. Neither was Cingular. Together, though, they made themselves the #2 network in the USA. One small problem: AT&T Mobility used DAMPS, the digital TDMA replacement for AMPS. Cingular used GSM (not originally, but by the time of the merger/acquisition). The proper move forward was GSM, but AT&T had to phase that out. That was also where most of their 850MHz slots were being used. They shut down the last DAMPS cell in 2008.. but had to upgrade them.

Two problems here, however, One is that DAMPS had greater range than GSM for regular voice/2G stuff. So some parts of today's cell grid from AT&T is not optimal. That's particularly bad on a standard GSM voice call, because GSM does hard handoff--- one cell drops you before the next one picks you up, as you move. If that fails, you drop the call. CDMA, and GSM/3G (UMTS/HSPA) do soft handoffs... the phone is actually connected to multiple cells at once, and one is dropped only when better ones are connected.

Then there's the GSM 3G technology. You can get that 7.2Mb/s downlink, versus a max of 3.1Mb/s on CDMA, largely because of fatter physical pipes. To see 7.2Mb/s (at least based on AT&Ts set regulation of per-user downlink speeds), you need a full HSPA+ setup, which is two cells bonded together, for a total of 20MHz bandwidth. Even for regular UMTS, you need 10MHz (5MHz up, 5MHz down) for the normal 3G. This meant new spectrum, rather than the CDMA folks being able to re-use their existing spectrum. Kind of.

AT&T actually had more licenses at 1900MHz, thanks to their merger with Cingular, so they could actually do 10MHz at least, 20MHz in some markets, using 850MHz and/or 1900MHz. So they just did. Which is in opposition to what had been planned, but it was legal.

Now, enter T-Mobile. They used to be tiny VoiceStream, at the time the only GSM company in the USA. They were acquired by the German Telecom, which might have been a problem, but they got Catherine Zeta Jones as their spokeswoman, and being really happy to see more of her on a regular basis, I know I didn't mind Germans running the thing. Besides, it's not as if the original VoiceStream did much good.

VoiceStream had a tiny network, and while they built it, they usually only had the single 1900MHz slot. So they didn't the range of AT&T or Verizon. Enter 3G... THEY actually needed the extra spectrum. Which was auctioned off... 1700MHz and 2100MHz. But this took time, of course... they were late to the party. And also, less investment in infrastructure, so even the completed 3G network covers much less.

At this point, though, you have to ask if 3G even matters. AT&T thinks it does... they're still upgrading their network for 7.2Mb/s HSPA+, and claim they'll have over 30 cities wired with the really fast 3G by mid 2010 (if you're an iPod 3GS user, you

Never Spotty

[Infiniti2000]

I post from my phone frequently and never hav

Did only whiners buy the Nexus One?

[cmkeane]

I ordered the N1 right out of the box, and it has performed almost flawlessly. The 3G has held as good as anything in REAL use. And it has compared favorably with my experience on the myTouch on t-mobile, and a long list of WM phones on AT&T. It is possible there is a bad batch in the initial production line, or perhaps people are spending WAY too much time looking at their signal status! I have never seen any phone be perfect in holding steady bars/speed level on any carrier in real use - you know, moving about in a building, driving a car, and even just sitting in my office. Too many variables. Its a friggin' phone, not a magical device and large production runs may have some flaws. Now the apparent lack of customer support planned, that is a different story.

Re:Did only whiners buy the Nexus One?

[GooberToo]

Why is this marked troll?!?

Really the big question is, is 3G available when the user wants to use 3G. Otherwise, who cares if its in 2G when the phone isn't being used as that likely provides a huge battery life boost.

Who knew?

[MongooseKY]

T-Mobile has 3G?

it's still in beta

[alen]

seriously, i was checking the Android Central forums and there is a whole thread there how it's a known issue with HTC phones going back at least a year and affects all carriers

3g? How about just some signal, period?

[damn_registrars]

I have friends who live in suburban developments near where I live, and I can't get any signal while at their house. Two blocks in one direction from there is 4 bars, one block in another direction is 3 bars (followed by a dead spot another block past). I don't give a damn about 3g on T-mobile (as a T-mobile customer) - I just want to be able to use my phone as a phone. I have a pretty decent signal at home, but I can't very well drive home from anywhere and hold signal all the way home.

And even worse, the coverage maps on T-mobile claim that I should get "good" coverage in these locations where I have no signal. And this is on a quad-band blackberry.

Welcome to reality.

[jtownatpunk.net]

This is the same with every 3G phone on every network I've ever used. I've had to add (or un-hide) a band selector on every 3G phone I've ever had because the default settings are always designed to lock onto the STRONGEST signal rather than the FASTEST signal. If I'm going to be doing data-intensive stuff, lock it in 3G. When I'm done, switch it back to auto.

A response from Google?

[sukotto]

You got a response from Google about a technical problem with one of their products?

How the hell did you accomplish that?

When you are on the bleeding edge...

[Pointy_Hair]

... it's always your blood all over the floor. Give it a while and they'll have that shiny new gadget patched up real nice!