I have seen from time to time that I will either have zero bars, or have a good signal (3-5 bars) but no data, even though I am close to a cell tower (like within half a mile or so). What's more, I have seen where people on other networks in those same places may have full signal & data (I'm on T-Mobile). Now, to be fair, I have seen it go the other way around where I was the only one with signal/data. But my question is, is there anything I can do when I am in an area like that? Is there a setting I can change on my phone to allow/force it to use the tower? By the way, I'm not talking about some rural, obscure area. I am talking about I-64 between Richmond and Norfolk, as well as parts of I-95 between RIchmond and DC.
I have a Note II, and my wife has a SGS-3 (both T-MO) and she has the same zero bars as I do, so it is network related and not phone.
I'd suggest you phone the carrier because it's clearly from their side.
Related
My wife and I both received the mt4g today and enjoyed good reception at home (several bars with 'H' displayed). Out at dinner, we both fluctuated between no reception at all, and 2 bars with 'E' displayed...with these fluctuations occurring numerous times while the phone was just sitting on the table. I don't recall seeing 3G displayed at any time, including while leaving the area back to where we were getting more bars with 'H' again. Is it possible there's a default setting that's off (not allowing 3G or causing some other issue resulting in spotty/fluctuating reception), or is this just crappy t-mobile coverage?
Btw, we live in a metro area and were with AT&T prior to this, and had never experienced a complete lack of coverage like this anywhere near the areas we were in. T-mobile's coverage map (including data) also lists the area we were in as having very good coverage.
I haven't seen a reception issue. Mine gets just barely better reception than my Nexus One did.
I've I'm off of H, should I be seeing 3G more commonly than E?
netter123 said:
My wife and I both received the mt4g today and enjoyed good reception at home (several bars with 'H' displayed). Out at dinner, we both fluctuated between no reception at all, and 2 bars with 'E' displayed...with these fluctuations occurring numerous times while the phone was just sitting on the table. I don't recall seeing 3G displayed at any time, including while leaving the area back to where we were getting more bars with 'H' again. Is it possible there's a default setting that's off (not allowing 3G or causing some other issue resulting in spotty/fluctuating reception), or is this just crappy t-mobile coverage?
Btw, we live in a metro area and were with AT&T prior to this, and had never experienced a complete lack of coverage like this anywhere near the areas we were in. T-mobile's coverage map (including data) also lists the area we were in as having very good coverage.
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my internet acts slow at times as well and with my hd2 i didnt have the problem so im starting to think it has to do with the software for the mt4g. maybe they will update the software but idk
I left sprint for the galaxy S 4g on the the day it was available, and have been very, VERY unhappy with the reception on the phone. I checked the coverage maps on t-mobile.com before I switched, and both my work and home locations are supposed to be in "maximum coverage" areas for voice AND data, but I am getting only 1 - 2 bars and edge (EDGE!!!) most of the time. often the phone drops to "no service" at my work location.
I love the device, but I never, NEVER had these issues with sprint. I can't believe that I actually see the E network symbol at the top of the phone, and not at least 3G.
Could this be a radio problem? Or are the coverage maps at t-mobile.com that inaccurate?
At least for the two locations where I have less-than-ideal coverage, the T-Mobile maps hint at that.
Both on a Nokia N900 (3.5G) and my SGS4G, what I actually get is probably a notch or two down -- for example, "4G Good" means I probably get 4G outside, but more likely am getting 3.5G or 3G, especially if I'm inside.
Life in LA said:
I left sprint for the galaxy S 4g on the the day it was available, and have been very, VERY unhappy with the reception on the phone. I checked the coverage maps on t-mobile.com before I switched, and both my work and home locations are supposed to be in "maximum coverage" areas for voice AND data, but I am getting only 1 - 2 bars and edge (EDGE!!!) most of the time. often the phone drops to "no service" at my work location.
I love the device, but I never, NEVER had these issues with sprint. I can't believe that I actually see the E network symbol at the top of the phone, and not at least 3G.
Could this be a radio problem? Or are the coverage maps at t-mobile.com that inaccurate?
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If you are getting EDGE you are in a 2G area. I have a 2G tower close enough that it would smash my motorhome if it fell over. I get between 4 to 16KB/sec transfer rate. From the research I've done, T-M is putting up new towers but they have a long way to go before the coverage is going to be available. Also I have found that when I am surfing the web, My phone misses calls. When I am talking on the phone, my computer can't surf the web very well. T-M claims they have 4G in place in major service areas but the reviews I've read they are lucky if it's 3.5G.
thanks
I am swapping the device today after work. hopefully, it resolves my issues. If not, it's back to sprint. (they called me with a "win back" pitch the other day, maybe they'll refund the ETF I paid...
Life in LA said:
If not, it's back to sprint.
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Had to chuckle a bit with the recent announcements in the business world. Thankfully, any device we just bought will be obsolete by the time any merger goes through...
Bummer
well, it wasn't the device!
Brand new unit, and I'm sitting here at work with 1 bar and EDGE network! (despite the fact that the coverage maps show me in the maximum coverage area for voice and data!) NEVER in the 2 years I had sprint did I ever see the edge network pop up on my phone.
Back to sprint I go!
Life in LA said:
Brand new unit, and I'm sitting here at work with 1 bar and EDGE network!
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How are you holding the device? do you have a shock-case for it?
Nearly every cell phone i have ever used suffered from the "Grip of Death" problem that was over-hyped on the iPhone. It's a normal and natural interaction that if you are holding both sides of the phone your signal will be crap.
T-Mobile just has spotty coverage in some areas. I live in a highly populated area, and I still lose 3G in certain places. I don't even get reception in my apartment, but my laptop with Verizon 3G does. I left AT&T because of a lack of Android devices, and my wife and I were sucked in by T-Mobile's free smartphone sale thing. Now AT&T has the Atrix and another cool phone and we're stuck with crappy coverage.
Okay recently my phone has had some really bad signal issues in parts that I always had the best signal. Now it roams and sometimes has no signal at all. I have the Heinz Rom loaded on my phone. One thing is though I live about 40-50 miles away from Joplin where the tornado recently hit. Well in Joplin was the main central hub for U.S. Cellular in southwest Missouri. Is it a chance that the loss of that building in the tornado could have effected the signals around Joplin areas.
Yes it could be that. I had a similar issue in are area when there where floods n high storms the tower cells were damaged and noticed low bars
Well i just got word that the reason why signal is messed up. The joplin US Cellular store was the main hub for the connections of the towers where I live. So when it got hit the towers are only working partially now till they find a fix for it :/
So we've been testing a Verizon and T Mobile phone (currently have Sprint) as Sprint has been pretty poor in our area as of late. The T Mobile phone is a Galaxy Blaze, and with it we get amazing 4G signal in the street outside our house. However, we can move literally 3 feet closer to the house, and the signal will drop to absolutely nothing. Inside the house it just frequently switches between very low 4G and very low Edge signal. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Is there any chance that a different phone (we want Nexus 4's) would have stronger reception and not have this problem, or is our house pretty much screwed?
Different internal radios will be different, yes.
However, I get absolutely no signal in my house with my T-Mobile S3. I don't find this to be a problem since T-Mobile has native calling over WIFI. Whole house is covered by strong WIFI signal and the call quality has been pretty great when used that way. I don't know if you can get WIFI calling onto the Nexus 4, I would guess probably not but who knows (maybe someone has found a way) - I'd have to research that.
I don't know how well a signal repeater would work, but it seems like it could since you could place it outside the home where it would have access to a great signal and repeat it inside.
If your Sprint phone can roam on Verizon, I'd question how much of a difference it would make to switch to Verizon itself. I have had both and the signal in my home was basically the same - the Sprint phone was connected to the same Verizon towers the Verizon phone was. I'm sure there might be some technical reasons there would be differences at some point (radios, how roaming is dictated), but I never noticed them in practical use.
Depends on the plans you're looking at and where you're willing to compromise.
For whatever reason, roaming doesn't seem to fix the problem on Sprint here. Verizon gets great signal, but 4 days in the 2gb plan is clearly not going to work. This pretty much leaves T-Mobile our only choice. T-Mobile also seems to just get better and faster service everywhere we go, so it would still be better than Sprint, as we're used to not having service at home anyway. It would just be unfortunate to have to continue like that.
I’m not sure this is the place to ask or if someone who knows the board better can move this.
I’m using cell phones as rural internet because there’s nothing here other than signing a 2-year contract and using satellite internet, and there’s a fiber-optic project supposedly under a year away.
I recently got moved (Straight Talk) from AT&T towers to T-Mobile. Uptime is around 30%, and after observing and trying to use for a week or so I figured out: Some towers work, some don’t. I can see a signal strength in “about phone” around -115 dbm when there’s no internet, that’s more like -92 when it works. I can fairly reliably get on a working tower for a couple minutes by:
Go into Airplane Mode (Android 5.02) for a minute, turning the radio off, then back on. Turn the wifi hotspot back on. On the computer drop and reestablish the connections to the phone’s AP (ifdown, wait, ifup), ping something to test. Slightly cumbersome and it switches back fairly soon. Sometimes minutes, sometimes hours. How busy the phone system is may affect this.
This particular phone is rooted so I could edit some text files if I knew which. I don’t know if the weak signal tower doesn’t work just because of the weak signal or if it’s located someplace without internet. If I could choose a preferred tower, or blacklist the bad one, or set the minimum acceptable signal to like -100 dbm, those would all work. There are probably apps for this. Or maybe it’s control the phone companies don’t want you to have.
ab1jx said:
I’m not sure this is the place to ask or if someone who knows the board better can move this.
I’m using cell phones as rural internet because there’s nothing here other than signing a 2-year contract and using satellite internet, and there’s a fiber-optic project supposedly under a year away.
I recently got moved (Straight Talk) from AT&T towers to T-Mobile. Uptime is around 30%, and after observing and trying to use for a week or so I figured out: Some towers work, some don’t. I can see a signal strength in “about phone” around -115 dbm when there’s no internet, that’s more like -92 when it works. I can fairly reliably get on a working tower for a couple minutes by:
Go into Airplane Mode for a minute, turning the radio off, then back on. Turn the wifi hotspot back on. On the computer drop and reestablish the connections to the phone’s AP (ifdown, wait, ifup), ping something to test. Slightly cumbersome and it switches back fairly soon. Sometimes minutes, sometimes hours. How busy the phone system is may affect this.
This particular phone is rooted so I could edit some text files if I knew which. I don’t know if the weak signal tower doesn’t work just because of the weak signal or if it’s located someplace without internet. If I could choose a preferred tower, or blacklist the bad one, or set the minimum acceptable signal to like -100 dbm, those would all work. There are probably apps for this. Or maybe it’s control the phone companies don’t want you to have.
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It may be possible to exclude certain towers, but for all intents and purposes, it is not possible to include/select/lock-in specific towers. Here is why, if the tools and methods to do so were readily available, then, inevitably more people would use those tools and methods. The more people were to use those tools/methods, the more unstable the whole network would become because the system would not be able to shift the load between towers to equalize/stabilize the network as a whole.
This is because the system works by balancing load, sometimes a signal can be weaker than another but, at the same time, also be faster than other. Stronger signal does not always equal faster speeds.
The concept would be similar to having more than one router/wifi signal at home, then, having everyone in the house and any/all neighbors that are in range, all connected to the same signal/router. The signal they are all connected to would be slow and unstable, the system must have the ability to "bounce" everyone around between all of the routers in order to keep performance at optimum levels "across the board". If everyone is "locked" to the one signal/router, the system can't manage itself, which leads to degradation.
Poor signal in rural areas can be expected, there isn't much you can do about it. The towers are positioned to provide coverage to as many customers as possible from their location. Also, some of the issue in rural areas is a "line of sight" thing. The lay of the land can be a hindrance to signal.
I also live in a rural area of a rural town. I get crappy signal when using cellular network, more down time than up time. I deal with having a decent(but still slow) signal for 1-2 minutes and then when the phone's system runs the next wifi/cellular data re-scan to search for better signal, everything stalls as if I'm getting no signal and it doesn't resume until it either keeps the connection it already has or it just drops out completely for 5-8 minutes until the next time the re-scan can find a signal to connect to. Then the cycle starts over with decent signal for 1-2 minutes or so, until the next re-scan, anyway. I have to turn of mobile data when at home because the virtually continuous re-scanning drains the battery and the device runs warmer than it should normally.
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OK, thanks. Line of sight - I'm at 1600 Feet elevation, people driving by stop to use the cell service before they go back into the next valley.
I've been with Straight Talk since 2015, originally using AT&T towers, I think we used 13 GB of data last month. AT&T worked very well, I'd say faster than satellite internet. Verizon is also an option.
A weak signal isn't the same weakness for everyone, some people will actually be closer to it. And the population density isn't very high around here. Lat 42.65, lon -72.83. I pay about $60/month for "unlimited data", some fraction of that must end up going to T-Mobile. If the county weren't going to be getting fiber optic networking soon I'd expect the money might go into building out cell systems to handle the load. There seems to be no scaling back and limiting everyone to some number of KB/sec, with that number decreasing as more people use it. My data's either in service or it isn't. -115 dbm is weak by everything I've seen.
I also have a Huawei E3372 modem I can put my SIM into. I bought a pair of small gain external antennas with 3 meter cords. I'd need to get those up high and run something like a Raspberry Pi as a router.
ab1jx said:
OK, thanks. Line of sight - I'm at 1600 Feet elevation, people driving by stop to use the cell service before they go back into the next valley.
I've been with Straight Talk since 2015, originally using AT&T towers, I think we used 13 GB of data last month. AT&T worked very well, I'd say faster than satellite internet. Verizon is also an option.
A weak signal isn't the same weakness for everyone, some people will actually be closer to it. And the population density isn't very high around here. Lat 42.65, lon -72.83. I pay about $60/month for "unlimited data", some fraction of that must end up going to T-Mobile. If the county weren't going to be getting fiber optic networking soon I'd expect the money might go into building out cell systems to handle the load. There seems to be no scaling back and limiting everyone to some number of KB/sec, with that number decreasing as more people use it. My data's either in service or it isn't. -115 dbm is weak by everything I've seen.
I also have a Huawei E3372 modem I can put my SIM into. I bought a pair of small gain external antennas with 3 meter cords. I'd need to get those up high and run something like a Raspberry Pi as a router.
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I am on Straight Talk also, but I'm on the Verizon side. In my opinion, the Verizon side is little better and has somewhat better coverage than the T-Mobile, Sprint or AT&T side. Other than when at home, I get perfect signal strength, the only reason I get crappy signal is I'm one of the ones dealing with line of sight. I'm several miles outside of town in a low-lying area between two hills.
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I should try Verizon. They're the default for landlines here but I got the impression they only did contract phones. I have 3 working Motorola XT1527s plus my modem, not interested in some contract phone. This T-mobile experience is my first other than AT&T. There's a website where you can download APK files to sideload, that runs through T-Mobile last I knew.
I think I've figured out how to talk to a human at Straight Talk. Call during east coast business hours, and in the 2nd menu mention data issues. The night/weekend people never seem to accomplish anything. They're eager to help bit they're most effective at the bulk of common issues like billing or changing a SIM. Took me over 10 phone calls last time to get anywhere.