Earlier this year I upgraded to this phone. I’m a former AT&T customer and when I upgraded my phone, they made me a Cingular customer.
I’ve experienced two peculiar phenomena since I switched over; never had these problems with the old phone or with AT&T.
Sometimes people call me and it goes straight to voicemail. At first, I thought it was because the phone holster I bought was pushing on the ignore button, but I’ve since experienced this in all kinds of settings, including when the phone was flat on the table with nothing even near the ignore button. I haven’t been able to detect any pattern to when it rings and when it doesn’t.
This phone seems to cause interference around radios and other electronics. Took me forever to figure out that it was the phone. All of a sudden I started to hear high-pitched sounds when I was near a radio. I’ve even had the monitor start to flicker when the phone was on the desk in front of it.
My questions:
Are these phenomena more likely related to the phone or to the change in carrier?
Is the interference something I need to worry about (could it be bad for my health or bad for the health of the appliances?)?
Is there anything I can do to reduce or eliminate this problem without changing phones?
Both. It’s the particular frequencies your carrier uses combined with the location of their towers and such. When the message goes directly to voicemail, the system likely thinks it can’t communicate to your phone. This could be because you aren’t getting a reliable signal, or it could be overloading on your carrier’s network.
The interference comes from your cell phone constantly staying in touch with the cell towers so the system knows where it is and that it is on. Radio signals are not harmful to you or your appliances.
Not much. If you notice that one area of your house gets better reception for your cell phone you might try keeping it in that area, since most cell phones these days will scale back their signal when they are getting a good connection so that they can save battery power. If the cell phone is transmitting less signal it will cause less interference.
Ferrites (available at your local radio shack, I think) can be added to certain cables like your monitor cable. Might help, might not. Ferrites are basically clamp on things that filter off the higher frequency radio signals.
Other than that, you can try re-orienting radio antennas and other things that get interference so that the effects are minimized by where you typically keep the phone.
Anything beyond this requires drastic measures such as a faraday cage (a big metal box around what you are trying to protect), which generally isn’t practical.
I had AT&T, and ever since the merger, Cingular has screwed up my plan, overcharging me, not recognizing plan changes, and not informing me of their rules. Cingular must be one big bunch of idiots.
I got a new phone when I switched from AT&T to Cingular as well, and now get this interference all the time through speakers- computer, home stereo, car radio, whatever- it’s beep, bip bip bip. But on the flip side, I get advance warning of incoming calls (bip bip, beep beeeeeeeeeeep, bip bip).
Nextels do something similar as well. Some of the pilots I work with have told me that they usually have to turn their Nextels off in flight because they get a rhythmic clicking in their headsets. Incidentally, they also say it’s fine to have cell phones on in flight; they don’t interfere with flight systems. It’s actually because in the air, instead of just communicating with, say, 3 cell towers, you’ll hit more like fifty; this drives the cell providers nuts because it fills up the airwaves.
I get the speaker interference too, but the radio one is the most annoying and noticeable. I just went back and looked, and mine is a GSM phone too (or at least, according to the details, it “Operates on 850/900/1900 MHz GSM/GPRS networks,” which may or may not be the same thing. (I HATE not understanding how this stuff works!) For the record, mine is a Motorola V180 (I clicked my own link and got a message saying my session had timed out).
Thanks for everyone’s responses. Any additional information is appreciated.