Cell Phone Service

G

George7941

Joined
May 10, 2005
Messages
2,737
Location
Toronto, Canada
About a week ago, all of a sudden, I had poor signal strength on the phone. I normally have 3 or 4 bars, out of 4, signal strength inside my house and the strength dropped to 0(No Service) or 1 bar at most. I had to go outside my house to make a call. Driving on open roads I would normally have 4 bars, it dropped to 2 or 3 bars. Restarting the phone, cleaning the SIM card etc did not help. The SIM card transferred to another phone produced the exact same poor signal.

I called my service provider on Saturday(two days ago) and CS said they would try a reset of my SIM card and that I would not have phone service till 6 pm. 6 pm arrived with no improvement. I called back and CS escalated my complaint to their tech dept and said tech would call me on Monday (today). Nobody called but, around noon today, signal strength went back to normal and I have good service now.

I called CS back to find out what happened but the guy did not know and all he could do was read from a prepared script.

I am just curious as to what they could have done on their end to restore my service.
 
A week seems like a long time. Also CS checked for outages when I called and did not come up with anything. Does not explain poor service driving miles away from home.
 
Last edited:
I have been using Google FI for over four years. It mostly uses the T-Mobile network in the USA. I do almost no texting. Data is free over wifi but you pay for data from towers over the mobile network. I'm paying about $25 a month for one phone. Coverage is quite good, even in Vermont.
 
Chris142 said:
Prolly lost a tower and you were having to connect to another one farther away
Click to expand...
This

Towers lose power and radios die. Remember most cell towers have three sectors and it only takes the radio to die that's pointed at you. All radios are in tight supply, because the focus now is on manufacturing and installing hundreds of thousands of new 5G (NR) radios. The manufacturers can't keep up.
 
k1xv said:
I have been using Google FI for over four years. It mostly uses the T-Mobile network in the USA. I do almost no texting. Data is free over wifi but you pay for data from towers over the mobile network. I'm paying about $25 a month for one phone. Coverage is quite good, even in Vermont.
Click to expand...

Yeah, Google Fi is pretty awesome, especially if you travel out of the country...it works pretty much everywhere.
 
Warstud said:
It's Wireless ........ so it's not gonna be as reliable as a landline phone .
Click to expand...
Actually, the system is extremely reliable, it's the people that move and make the signal weak. If I'm reasonably close to a tower, I'll take the cell phone any day. Landlines are ancient and the telcos aren't maintaining the infrastructure that supports them.
 
Something else to keep in mind is if your carrier is a MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator), your carrier will always be a lower priority to the main carrier. You didn't mention the carrier, but just a thought about something that could make the situation worse since the primary carrier is being prioritized over the MVNO traffic.
 
racer12306 said:
Something else to keep in mind is if your carrier is a MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator), your carrier will always be a lower priority to the main carrier. You didn't mention the carrier, but just a thought about something that could make the situation worse since the primary carrier is being prioritized over the MVNO traffic.
Click to expand...
I thought they did not discriminate! My provider is Speakout, operated by the 7-eleven chain, and they use the Rogers network.
 
George7941 said:
About a week ago, all of a sudden, I had poor signal strength on the phone. I normally have 3 or 4 bars, out of 4, signal strength inside my house and the strength dropped to 0(No Service) or 1 bar at most. I had to go outside my house to make a call. Driving on open roads I would normally have 4 bars, it dropped to 2 or 3 bars. Restarting the phone, cleaning the SIM card etc did not help. The SIM card transferred to another phone produced the exact same poor signal.

I called my service provider on Saturday(two days ago) and CS said they would try a reset of my SIM card and that I would not have phone service till 6 pm. 6 pm arrived with no improvement. I called back and CS escalated my complaint to their tech dept and said tech would call me on Monday (today). Nobody called but, around noon today, signal strength went back to normal and I have good service now.

I called CS back to find out what happened but the guy did not know and all he could do was read from a prepared script.

I am just curious as to what they could have done on their end to restore my service.
George7941 said:
About a week ago, all of a sudden, I had poor signal strength on the phone. I normally have 3 or 4 bars, out of 4, signal strength inside my house and the strength dropped to 0(No Service) or 1 bar at most. I had to go outside my house to make a call. Driving on open roads I would normally have 4 bars, it dropped to 2 or 3 bars. Restarting the phone, cleaning the SIM card etc did not help. The SIM card transferred to another phone produced the exact same poor signal.

I called my service provider on Saturday(two days ago) and CS said they would try a reset of my SIM card and that I would not have phone service till 6 pm. 6 pm arrived with no improvement. I called back and CS escalated my complaint to their tech dept and said tech would call me on Monday (today). Nobody called but, around noon today, signal strength went back to normal and I have good service now.

I called CS back to find out what happened but the guy did not know and all he could do was read from a prepared script.

I am just curious as to what they could have done on their end to restore my service.
Click to expand...
Click to expand...

George7941 said:
About a week ago, all of a sudden, I had poor signal strength on the phone. I normally have 3 or 4 bars, out of 4, signal strength inside my house and the strength dropped to 0(No Service) or 1 bar at most. I had to go outside my house to make a call. Driving on open roads I would normally have 4 bars, it dropped to 2 or 3 bars. Restarting the phone, cleaning the SIM card etc did not help. The SIM card transferred to another phone produced the exact same poor signal.

I called my service provider on Saturday(two days ago) and CS said they would try a reset of my SIM card and that I would not have phone service till 6 pm. 6 pm arrived with no improvement. I called back and CS escalated my complaint to their tech dept and said tech would call me on Monday (today). Nobody called but, around noon today, signal strength went back to normal and I have good service now.

I called CS back to find out what happened but the guy did not know and all he could do was read from a prepared script.

I am just curious as to what they could have done on their end to restore my service.
Click to expand...
I've had Sprint for 20ish years until the merger. A few years back I was noticing that around 7pm or so I would lose all cell signal. This went on for week. A call to customer service said that they were working on the towers in the evening. Could be a local tower issue.
 
It's possible they converted the frequency band that was best covering your house to be 5G only. Were both of the phones that you tried only 4G?
 
mk378 said:
It's possible they converted the frequency band that was best covering your house to be 5G only. Were both of the phones that you tried only 4G?
Click to expand...
I am not sure. The display on the phone, next to signal strength, always says 3G. My current phone is an old one from 2016, a iPhone SE
 
mk378 said:
It's possible they converted the frequency band that was best covering your house to be 5G only. Were both of the phones that you tried only 4G?
Click to expand...
They do move existing spectrum from 3G or LTE to 5G, but they usually don't move all the bandwidth, because it's too disruptive. For example, if they were using 20Mhz from the 700Mhz band on a LTE radio and wanted to use it for 5G radio, they might leave 10Mhz for the LTE radio and move 10Mhz to the 5G radio. The bandwidth allocations do get really complex. I have seen towers with three sets of radios and spectrum from at least 9 different bands.
 
atikovi said:
Still have two landline numbers. Can't beat the sound quality.
Click to expand...

Sure you can! The MOS score of a POTS line at best is around 4, while the MOS score of G.722 wideband is >4.5. However, if you are on a POTS line and you call someone on a cell phone, their wonderful G.722 VoLTE call gets transcoded down to the POTS line in a media gateway. The result is a less than G.722 quality call.

If you are talking VoLTE to VoLTE on cell phones, you get a rich wide-band experience with a MOS of >4.5. Then put a good bi-aural bluetooth 5.x headset on your cell phone and you'll blow away the sound quality of any analog or digital line.
 
wwillson said:
Landlines are ancient and the telcos aren't maintaining the infrastructure that supports them.
Click to expand...

Depends on what you mean by a "landline". I consider the Xfinity voice service at my house to be a "landline" even though it's delivered over fiber and coax.

I prefer it over using my cellphone. The sound quality is much better out of a full-size telephone handset compared to a cell phone. I'm sure there's some bluetooth device I could purchase to fix that...but I'm not going to bother.

One reason I keep a landline around is in case my cellphone craps out. If that happens, I have no way to call anyone without a landline.
 
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