Cell Phone Dropped Calls

Factual Questions
1

Okay, I am going to try and keep this as a question with a factual answer, rather than a dump-fest about certain cell phone companies.

I have problems with dropped calls while indoors at my house. A call that starts with signal to spare can cut off suddenly ten minutes later.

Symptoms:

  1. This doesn’t seem to happen as often if I sit outside on my front porch. (Not a bad option these days, but making calls in February was suboptimal.)
  2. The company in question claims there are six towers within five miles of my house.

Not surprisingly, the company in question recommends that I purchase a new phone. (Mine is two years old, and a three year old model.)

Questions:

  1. Do different cell phone providers place different priorities on maintaining connections compared to grabbing new calls?

  2. How do I tell when looking at a phone whether it broadcasts “better” than another phone

  3. (More opiniony) Does this sound to you like a problem that would be fixed by upgrading phones, or should I upgrade companies too?

2

Okay, I accidentally hit submit while the hamsters were still searching for threads.

If you have more to add than this thread, feel free to do so.