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.

Comments

Antennas

[Hardhead_7]

It's not really a mystery. Phones used to have external antennas, and now they're not only internal but the phones themselves have mostly metal cases (because it feels so much more "premium") with a tiny plastic window for the antenna because that metal blocks the radio waves. This is textbook "form over function" design.

Re:Antennas

[pushing-robot]

Also, there's a ton more of them these days and they're sending and receiving a massive amount of data, which necessitated switching from the old analog AMPS network to increasingly complex digital networks and opening up much higher frequency bands which don't penetrate as well.

It's like saying "WiFi routers were better 10 years ago" because back then you had the whole 2.4GHz band to yourself.

Re: Antennas

[tysonedwards]

That is not what the tests were referring to in the article... Devices need a significantly higher signal to maintain a connection than the standards recommend, and some reference platforms for chipsets are closer in line with the standards, but themselves are *a little* high, others *a little* low. As such, OEMs are taking what is essentially a known good chipset, coupling it with an antenna design that is more insulated or otherwise inferior for some reason, at which point creating a less capable communications product - for some reason.

With regards to devices like the 3 Google Fi phones dropping calls when they don't on other providers... Perhaps it's more a byproduct of the additional overhead of routing voice calls as data to account for the 2 cellular carriers or wifi hand-off that can take place, treating the call as VoIP between the handset and the server as compared to legacy deployments that did not have the added complexity or potential points of failure?