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In Rural UK, Old 2G Phones Beat 3G Smarphones For Connectivity
hypnosec writes "A new research has showed that smartphones are worse in connectivity than 2G enabled mobile phones in remote areas in the United Kingdom. The research conducted by telecom watchdog OfCom has revealed that users should invest in mobile phones different than latest Smartphones, if they prioritize best reception for calls. 'As would be expected, all the 2G operators have widespread coverage of the roads that were surveyed with relatively few not-spots. 3G coverage is much lower on the roads driven, likely reflecting the stage of network roll out in Devon at the time of the study,' the OfCom has reported."
Iphone is suprisingly fussy about mobile reception in a congested city. If you have 3g enabled and are in one of the many odd spots it just won't ring. Calls just fail to get to you even with a good signal. Its very odd an absolutly infuriating when you miss an important call. And with 3g turned off you wonder what your paying the high subscription for?
So there is more 2G coverage than 3G coverage? I am shocked. And can't many phones turn off 3G service and fall back to 2G?
Oh. I get it. It's like one of those, "in soviet Russia..." jokes, but instead, "In rural UK..." Brit humor. Never could wrap my head around it.
If you want remote areas, look at some place like Australia or Alaska. That's remote!
Obviously, in areas with comparatively early cell build-outs, there are very likely going to be areas where less-than-bleeding edge is all you get. So, if you live in one of those, paying a premium for some zOMG 4G++!!! burn-through-your-monthly-data-cap-in-10-minutes device is not a good plan. Ok. So much is obvious.
The relevant question is, do recent devices fall back gracefully, and how do older or 2G only devices compare to their contemporaries in terms of things like antenna quality? Having a 3G device; but being limited to 2G capabilities in a 2G area is simply an inevitable inconvenience. If, however, 3G devices that just silently fail outside of 3G areas, or take excessively long times to fall back, or do some silly little dance where they switch between a hopelessly weak 3G signal and the available 2G tower every couple of seconds, or if contemporary RF design is based on the theory that all customers loath antennas and live 300 meters from a cell tower, then the fact that some areas are 2G only starts to factor into your buying decision...
There are still many places in the USA where there is no 3G, or limited 3G while 2G coverage is decent. As a result, turning off 3G is needed if you want reliable service.
Besides, the "late-night aggressive shopping" is better in Tottenham.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
The 2G phones were designed at a time when the manufacturers still thought people gave a shit about coverage or battery life.
Apple has shown us all that they don't. Give 'em a slick user-interface and an App Store, and they'll just accept the poor coverage and the need to charge the phone every day.
The regulator went on to add that older phones passed the call testing with 97 percent success rate while latest Smartphones managed only 95 percent during the test.
It's just 2% difference (and we don't have any information about statistical population). So if they tested 100 2G phones and 100 smartphones, 3 2G phones and 5 3G phones where not suited for the given area. Wow, big deal...
In love, war and slashdot discussions, everything is allowed.
The article misrepresents the Ofcom report. Here's what the report actually said:
However, in the more rural areas that the phones were tested, the feature/entry-level phones generally returned somewhat better performance than smartphones for call completion and call setup. This may be due to the reduced complexity of antenna on these devices and 2G phones not having issues in switching between 2G and 3G networks. These performance differences are likely in practice to be modest, and not necessarily a factor that consumers should base their choice of phone on.
Source: http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/market-data-research/telecoms-research/mobile-not-spots/mobile-coverage-for-consumers/
They go on to say that this may be in part due to the complexity of switching between 3G and 2G and that it can be mitigated by turning off 3G in your smartphone in rural areas...construing this as "users should invest in mobile phones different than latest Smartphones" is a bit of a leap.
Yes, you are absolutely right. When I first used a mobile phone, it didn't do really anything but make calls and store numbers. It also didn't lock up or have poor battery life (it would go a week easily without a charge). More recent smart phones have all lost that. I remember my first smart phone (don't laugh) was a Windows Mobile 5.0 phone with a stylus and a Windows start menu. It could play solitaire! Woohoo, right? But it also would sometimes lock up. Worse, it would - maybe once a month - stop receiving calls with no warning. It was the beginning (for me) of the "OK, so they aren't great phones anymore but they play games and can browse the web" era. Each phone I have had since then (Motorola Droid 1, Motorola Droid 3, LG Revolution, Motorola Atrix, HTC Aria, etc.) has been like that: a nice enough device, but by no means a great phone. Battery life is poor, they do sometimes not get calls or stop being able to use the internet or text, etc. The basic phone parts sometimes have trouble with failing to turn off the touch screen while on a call so your face presses "end call", etc. The voice features have really not stayed up to par at all on modern smart phones.
Most phone's and all smart phone's can switch settings and you can hard set the 2G if you like, so don't be silly and dumb down your device, just get smart and use the setting available to you,
I can verify the coverage is awful, but then not receiving any sort of reception at all is common. Making a phone call from some of the more rural locations is impossible.
It's because we didn't constantly fuck with our phones back then!
An iPhone 4 can easily go a week without charging it if you turn off all the push functionality, e-mail checking, ONLY use it for calls and don't spend a lot of time on the phone.
But because we want to do so many things with our phones now, of course the battery life won't be as good as it used to be. :)
well doh 2g tech with it's bigger cells has more coverage and more penetration with it's wavelength, especially if they're talking about 900mhz 2g! but why do you have separate operators for tech that's shipped in devices that has handovers between the technologies? I mean, I'm writing this over an edge connection but should I take this outside of this cabin to a better spot I'd get switched to pretty decent 3g. but having separate operators for these two technologies is a total fail of grand scale.
I guess uk is special with it's crap "3", the licensing bodies seemed to really fuck the spectrum use up there.
btw. 900mhz 3g makes all the difference where it's available - and these proper 2.5g support and 3g switching are the things that separate crap phones with crap comm chips from decent phones which support the network like they're supposed to(why don't some 3g phones have edge support? well, that's actually partially again fault of the licensing bodies for the spectrums).
(actually the article seems to mention that it's just some crappily designed smartphones which have troubles with 2g to 3g switching, you see, money doesn't buy quality everytime, 100e phone might function better than a 600e showpiece)
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Generally there are the good 2G networks that have rather lackluster 3G networks (O2, Vodafone)
And vice versa (The others)
But T-Mobile uses 3's 3G network (which I consider easily the best) and a combined T-Mobile+Orange 2G network (not as good as Vodafone's 2G coverage but really not bad at all). Seems a really good all-rounder. And they have nice modern Twitter based support where they actually answer you.
It depends on the distance to the base station which alternative that is the best. At long distance and where there are interference caused by trees and buildings 2G is better since the lower bit rate isn't as easily corrupted.
I suspect that it has a lot to do with the Shannon–Hartley theorem.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
I found that out in the military. Navy, to be precise?
We were at sea on training exercises, and had been off Oahu all week long. It was Friday, and we were supposed to be coming back into port on Monday, but due to some of our gear going *BZORCH*, we wanted to come in early for repairs.
Naturally, we were down on CUDIXS, which meant no outgoing message traffic, which meant no talking to the port engineer in Pearl.
I was on the O2 level with my old, 1-penny analog brickphone, talking to friends and family while we were 12 miles off shore. The Ops officer was trying to use his small, expensive, shiny Motorola digital sport phone, and not getting anything. I knew if he couldn't get through, we were going to be spending the weekend at sea, so I offered him my phone.
"That thing won't get any signal out here," he sneered. "What's the number, sir?" He humored me and told me, so I dialed.
"Yes, this is petty officer "Ionotter", is the port engineer there? Yes, thank you. Hello, sir? Yes, this is (PO "I") with the Reuben James? My Ops officer wants to talk to you. Sure, here he is."
And we got to pull into port before 1630.
If you're line of sight, digital is fine. If you want OTH, stick with analog. (And for the record, the best I've done was 90 miles off the Na'Pali coast of Kaua'i, with three full bars.)
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I'm in the heart of the USA. And one of the things I noticed about my brother, daughters, my male friend, and others, is all of their $500 smart phones just wouldn't receive calls sometimes. The phone just wouldn't ring. Now finally I and two other people on my phone plan have gotten Android phones, leaving only my mother with a non-Smart, basic flip phone. Although my phone has been fairly reliable, nephew tried to call me once and my phone never rang. And this is in an area with good cell phone coverage. I even get 4G. So he had to call my mother on her flip phone and tell her to pass the message on to me. It's only happened to me once but still, as far as I know, my mother with her flip phone is the only person in the family who hasn't missed any calls due to the phone just not ringing.
And the "penetration" within buildings, and the battery life... it's something *known* in the design of the 3G systeme!
I live east of the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland. The only phones with any reception are Nokia phones. Best is the old 1100, then 6010, older N-series. Newer phones get worse reception. Nothing at all with Moto, S-E, iPhone. Samsung. Bummer.
Nokia 1100 doesn't even have a camera. The flashlight is wonderful.
In Australia the old CDMA band is being used for 850MHz UMTS, with very good coverage, in fact better than 2G, by Telstra. Optus & Vodafone use 900MHz UMTS in some of their GSM spectrum. This can be done because they have a spectrum licence. What they do with their chunk of spectrum is their business. All three carriers also operate 2100MHz UMTS, but Telstra is focusing its efforts on 850MHz. Voda & Optus are sticking to dual bands since 2100MHz gives more capacity (greater chunk of spectrum) for city use. Telstra's chunk of 850MHz is big enough for city use too. Europe is rolling out 900MHz UMTS and the US and Canada also have 850MHz UMTS.
Lower frequency UMTS can have better coverage than GSM for the same power level. GSM is a TDMA system and the normal timeslots limit subscribers to being within 35km of the base. This was a problem in Australia with the large wide open spaces with just enough hills for good cell sites. Telstra tweaked the standard to only use half the timeslots, letting subscribers be up to 70km away. The CDMA signalling used by UMTS doesn't have this problem, and just like CMDA2000 the limitation is based on signal strength.
I'm guessing that there would be very places in the UK that are more than 35km from a cell site. Are any carriers using 900MHz UMTS? I'd suspect too that the 2G signals giving better coverage are all 900MHz ones, as 1800MHz is quite similar in propagation to the standard 2100MHz frequency of 3G in Europe).
With micro USB as the standard mobile phone charger, every computer is effectively a mobile phone charger. If there are chargers everywhere, is battery life that big a deal?
Yes.
Next stupid quetion?
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Well someone's got something wrong, because we don't have 4G in the UK. Nor in any parts of western Europe that I noticed.
They don't have it in the US either.
("4G" is American marketing speak for 3G)
Watch this Heartland Institute video