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Cellphones Really Are Not As Good As They Were 10 Years Ago At Making Calls (telegraph.co.uk)
whoever57 writes: If you ever thought that your cellphone does not make calls as well as the cellphone you had 10 years ago, you may be right. The UK's Ofcom (roughly equivalent to the FCC) tested cellphones and found that many needed a much higher signal than the standards recommend in order to send and receive data. This applied to 2G, 3G and 4G connections. Confirmation bias has me nodding along; Google Fi has been dropping a huge percentage of my calls lately, and I've been unfairly reminiscing about the good old days with a heavy Nokia 5100 series phone.
RTFA: "top-of-the-range smartphone is not as good for basic communications as the mobile you used a decade ago.
...a handset costing a fraction of the price typically provides better signal performance for voice calls and texts. "
So your comparison is wrong. It's about basic functionality that the newer phones perform poorly. Read the article sometime.
No it wont. most carriers are shutting down the 2G and earlier phone compatibility. by next summer it will not be useable in any way.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Frequencies have barely changed. In 1999, European cellphones topped out at 1.8GHz, and US at 1.9GHz. In 2015, both are now at 2.1GHz, barely 10% higher. So that's not it.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
The antenna was not the entire case, but the band around the edge of the case.
No. This is incorrect. You can order the cellular antenna as a part. The wifi antenna was separate.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Since most of the replies to you so far are smarmy, I'll try to answer your question.
An antenna is not just a piece of metal. It's a resonance chamber. When you were a kid, you probably sloshed water back and forth in the bathtub. If you did it at the right frequency, the waves would get bigger and bigger, and eventually slosh over the sides getting your mom and dad all wet.
That's exactly what an antenna does. The EM waves passing through the antenna sloshes electrons back and forth. If it's just the right frequency (called a resonance frequency), the sloshing gets bigger and bigger, creating a stronger signal for the electronics in the phone to pick up. Other frequencies don't create as big a sloshing (or any sloshing), so the amplifies amplifies signals close to the resonance frequency relative to other frequencies. The effect is very pronounced if designed correctly, and allows you to easily pull out exactly the signal you want from a sea of EM noise. What determines the resonance frequency? The size of the bathtub, or the length of the antenna.
You can't use a metal case as an antenna because it's too broad. The resonance frequency along a diagonal would be different than along the edge, and your "antenna" wouldn't tune out a lot of the other frequencies you consider to be noise. You can get around this by using just the edge of the case (Apple tried this). But then anything conductive which touches the antenna (like your hand) can alter its resonance frequency, causing it to not work anymore as an antenna.
So the best antenna design is still a metal wire of just the right length so its resonance frequency matches your cell phone carrier's frequency, mounted internally so as to isolate it from contact with other conductive items. Wrapping that wire inside a metal body creates a Faraday cage which blocks out EM signals, making reception (and transmission) worse. That's what's been so frustrating about all these bloggers and reviewers who failed high school physics who think metal makes a phone "premium". No it doesn't, it makes it a Faraday cage which is pretty much an anti-radio, the worst possible thing you could do to a phone. Save the metal cases for jewelry boxes. Plastic or carbon fiber is the best material for a phone (or radio) case.
Note that bands are completely arbitrary human constructs, and the number depends entirely on context. For example there is the "VHF band" from 30MHz to 300MHz which primarily handles television and FM and two-way radio. Within that band are many sub-bands that get allocated for different purposes - every radio and television station get allocated a narrow band of frequencies to broadcast in, and receivers need to tune to that specific frequency band to receive, say, channel 7 as opposed to channel 6 or 8 - every TV and radio channel is defined by its own radio band.
Think of it like weather radios - they can only tune to one or two stations (bands), and as a result are much cheaper than a similar-quality general-purpose radio that needs to be able to tune to dozens of different stations.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.