I have horrible cell phone reception/transmission in my apartment. Calls get dropped all the time. Sometimes I can’t even make a call. I’m probably missing calls.
My wife, on the other hand, has no trouble at all. Nor do friends who use their phones when they visit.
This leads me to believe the problem is with my service provider (T-Mobile). My wife has AT&T, and others with Verizon or Sprint don’t have any trouble.
And it’s not my phone, either. I had the same problem with my last phone (the current one is a Nexus 5, and I forget what the last one was).
So can anything be done about this, or do I just have to switch service providers? Is there some kind of signal booster I can get at a reasonable price?
Look at your setting and see if there’s one labeled “WiFi calling”.
Or stop by an AT&T store and ask them. I’m on AT&T and used to have a MicroCell hooked to my DSL. Latest Android update added WiFi Calling and I no longer need the MicroCell.
Out of the blue, AT&T offered us a microcell seven or eight years ago. It hooks directly into our cable router, and gives us 4-5 bars of signal anywhere in the house or yard. It’s a little fussy, and needs to be rebooted every once in a while, but as we, too, are in a bit of a black hole for cell phone reception, it’s been a godsend.
I’ll also note that my mother-in-law has T-Mobile (mostly because she is cheap), and her service is terrible, both in her house, and pretty much everywhere else.
We had lousy reception for years. I’d have to go outside to one specific sweet spot to make important calls. Then one day about a year ago my phone rang inside the house, I answered, and the call was perfect.
Not much to add to the OP: I have family members with T-Mobile and they suffer just like you do, in my home where AT&T and Verizon have strong signals.
On the WiFi calling tangent:
WiFi calling for AT&T is perfect for me. I normally work in my basement, a place that doesn’t get decent reception, but once WiFi calling came out that all changed.
Instead of seeing “AT&T 3G” or whatever next to the signal strength it says “AT&T Wi-Fi”, so there is never any doubt which one the phone is using.
Also, my Apple Watch will now receive calls even if the phone is off, as long as I’m connected to wifi.
No problem with dropped calls, but that may be correlated with the quality of my Internet service–I haven’t had an outage since Hurricane Sandy, and even then it was only a few hours.
Seems to be working fine. I’d noticed that the little blurb at the top of the screen that said “MicroCell” was gone one day. Rebooted the MicroCell to no avail. Stopped by the AT&T store to inquire and was informed that I didn’t need the MicroCell anymore. I’m in the country and otherwise have poor service inside.
Different providers support different cell bands. Different phones also support different cell bands. It’s possible your phone does not support the bands that are available to you at your home. (It’s also possible that your home just has lousy reception for those bands).
Here’s T-mobile’s bands:
“T-Mobile network supports (LTE bands 2, 4 and 12, HSPA+ on AWS and 1900 MHz, and GSM on 1900 MHz). However band support is not the only requirement. T-Mobile issued a statement regarding further requirements for band 12 unlocked phones: All Band 12 LTE devices on our network must support VoLTE, E911”
You need a phone that supports these bands to get good LTE service with this provider. There are also band ranges for the lower rate services for each provider.