As I sit here in my office staring bleakly at my cell phone’s signal bars, I realize that there are none. Yep, there’s no signal at all. If I try to use the cellphone, I get a “No Network” message; if I call it, it goes right to voice mail.
But at other times during the day, I get two, three, or even four bars!
What’s the reason that signals that presumably come from a fixed tower at a fixed strength would be so variable here? I can easily understand how strength might flicker between zero and one, or even zero and two… but what factors are in play that can cause the same phone in the same spot to get zero signal one hour and “four bar” signal strength in another hour?
There is a cell tower on the building accross the street from my office. Back when ATT wireless was my provider, the signal was pinned at max, even in the elevator. After Cingular bought them, I was lucky to get one bar of signal strength. I switched to Verizon, and the signal is once again pinned to the max as I type this.
But…
Cingular sells their phones with all of the phone’s options intact from the factory, while Verizon cripples the functionality of several key aspects of their phones prior to shipping them. It was discussed on ‘The Loop: Crippled Cell Phone Features’ on a 06/15 broadcast of G4 . There just is no ‘Good Guy’ in telecom…
I believe there was a lawsuit about this. It seems that Cingular promised to maintain service to customers when they bought AT&T, but they immediately and intentionally began downgrading their service to force them to switch or get a new contract or something. Maybe you are eligible for part of the class action.
Weather. Atmospheric conditions can have a strong influence on signal strength. They can cause signals to bend or be ducted. This is often noticable when the transmitting station is just over the horizon, the signal travels over a body of water, or there are temperature inversions in the atmosphere.
A guy at the cell phone store told me that as a given cell tower takes on more capacity (i.e. more callers are on at once) it reduces its coverage radius. Essentially it figures to let the people nearest the edges of its coverage area to get picked up by a different cell tower. As a result you can see varying signal strength as you may be getting handed off to a different tower that may have more available capacity but not be situated as well to provide you a strong signal.
Take the above with a grain of salt considering the source but in this case the salesman definitely came across as knowing his stuff rather than just pushing cell phones. Sounds reasonable anyway.
Great query. I’ve been wondering the same thing, as my Nextel service has found a handbasket and is noticeably warmer since the Sprint merger. While sitting on my desk, it will go from 4 bars to beep no service and back again.
This is true for CDMA, but it’s not intentional. (Cingular doesn’t use CDMA, but Sprint and Verizon do.)
CDMA basically works like a bunch of people talking in a room. If several people are talking at once, you can “tune in” a particular conversation by focusing on a voice (the “code” in Code Division Multiple Access), even though their voices are all traveling through the same air (radio frequency band).
But every new conversation adds noise and makes it harder to hear the other voices. If there are only two of you in the room, you’ll have no problem hearing the other guy, but when the room fills up, you can only hear the people standing right next to you. You can tell someone to speak up so you can hear him over the noise, but now his voice interferes even more with everyone else. If the person you’re trying to hear is all the way across the room, he’s going to have to talk four times as loud (inverse square law) as someone half as far away just for his voice to sound the same to your ears, and if he can’t get that loud, you won’t be able to hear him over the sound of the nearby conversations.
Since there’s an upper limit on the volume of everyone’s voice (battery power, FCC regulations, and not wanting to interfere with every other call), this means that your effective range of hearing shrinks as more people enter the room.
Im in college, and have my cell phone paid for by my stepdad.
Its cingular. I try telling him, and my mom that we need to switch to Verizion, and not Cingular. I think my stepdad is still convinced that we just need a better phone (Hardware) and that its not the carrier.
As for the commercial, with cingular having the least dropped calls. I bet it’s true. ONCE YOU CAN ACTUALLY CALL SOMEONE. … You can’t have a dropped call, if its never “picked up” in the first place.
