So Una,
What service do you use? That makes much more difference than what phone.
Verizon, which is the same as many of my co-workers and clients who seemingly cannot use their phones.
My friend, you are sadly mistaken if you think the primary measure of an iPhone is how well it works as a phone, or as a browser or media player for that matter. No indeed, an iPhone is a Lifestyle Statement. It is ALL about having the newest shiniest toy on the block, and not giving a rat’s ass for anyone else around. Now you can not only ignore those in the immediate vicinity by hanging on the phone or blotting out the world with your tunes, you can nauseate all of us by flashing though your baby pictures simultaneously. And we all know how much it costs, so we all know you must have loads of disposable income.
For this it works great, even if you never complete a single call.
You hit the nail on the head: cell companies these days actually make most of their “best” money on features, not on actual service coverage. Consumers care about service coverage of course, but they don’t really have the capacity to determine who has the best in their area or the areas they are likely to travel in. And, of course, nearly every carrier claims that they have the best the coverage.
Coverage is really expensive to increase: the companies can ultimately make money on it over time, but its not the sort of instantly increasing profits that allow them to expand and compete and put out great quarterly statements.
The new T-Mobile deal is pretty smart in this regard: they are selling home and hotspot coverage with phones that can work on wireless networks as well as cell networks, and doing it by giving away wireless routers. So in short, they are selling coverage as a “feature” (and to boot, it actually helps them, because net connections and wifi are existing architecture that doesn’t really cost them much at all to expand, saving them tons of bandwidth costs on their cell network) Your best hope is that stuff like this will catch on and that better and better coverage will catch on. After all, a lot of the goofy features like streaming video and so forth are going to require a LOT more coverage and bandwidth.
Roland, then get yourself a Globalstar satellite phone. It has both cell and satellite phone capability. The cell component works best with Verizon, and unlike Iridium, the satphone component doesn’t use some bizarre prefix, so that if someone calls you on that number, it’s like calling Texas, and they won’t suddenly wind up with a bill that’s insane because it cost them $10/min. to talk to you, like it would if you had an Iridium.
Now THAT is something I could get behind. My last experience with a satphone, which was admittedly six years ago, involved a lot of running around and standing in strange positions to be able to hear anything, and praying a passing pigeon didn’t disconnect the call. I’m willing to deal with that if it’s a life-or-death situation, but in-city? No thanks. A combo cell/sat sounds like exactly what I’m looking for. Thanks for the suggestion.
Of course, cell phones have long been billed as lifesavers in their own right, so my rant about them not working when you need them most still stands. Also, I live 200 yards from not one but two big honkin’ cell towers, there are at least three more that I know of in the mountains that surround the Roanoke valley, and there are STILL places in the heart of the city that all of my phones have gotten wonky. Hell, my Sprint phone couldn’t place a call from right underneath the Sprint billboard downtown. That’s just fucked up.
So am I the only person in the world who has never had a problem using a cell phone?
I’ve had cell phones for five years or so now, and can not recall ever having any problems with connectivity.
Just lucky?
-FrL-
I didn’t mean to intimidate you…
What type of satphone was it that you used? At one time or another, I’ve played with most brands and each of them have their shortcomings.
Gee, that’s not what this place says. What’s that I smell? Is it … bias?
Meanwhile, this is the longest and most detailed write-up I’ve seen on the rumored Google phone. Don’t expect too much from it. It looks like nothing more than a way for Google to get into a new market. Even if they fail they’ll learn a lot from it, so it’s not like there’s a downside for them, especially since they’re not going to be making the hardware which is where the real liability problems can come into play.
The main cellphone carrier here is SaskTel, and as they are a government crown corporation, only operate in Sasktchewan. As I’m sure you all know, practically half of the land in Saskatchewan is forest up north or sparsely populated farmland, and there’s a significant rural population. SaskTel concentrates on coverage over features, which pisses off a lot of younger people in the larger cities, but it also means you can go camping up north and still get reception. There’s a lot of mining and forestry operations that need that cellphone service. And yeah, I’d rather have the good service and a crappy phone than a pretty phone that I can’t get reception with. Rogers Canada has been putting up some towers themselves, and they work well enough in the lower third of the province but the service sucks everywhere else.
Nothing fucked up about it at all. The quality of your service has absolutely nothing to do with your phone’s proximity to a billboard. You do understand that, right?
Well, hell; I’m sitting here in our new house in the busy (and well-to-do) suburb community of Carmel, Indiana (immediately north of Indianapolis), and my Sprint phone keeps fluctuating between 2 and 3 bars of coverage, but that’s mainly because I’m sitting by a window and it’s apparently a good day. Most of the time I get just one or two bars.
Just about a mile down the road, at a nearby shopping complex is a Sprint PCS store. About 300 yards north of that store, (still in a busy residential/retail area) my Sprint phone will go into digital roam.
Friends of ours who had Sprint had to give up their service and switch to another carrier when they moved to that neighborhood because the Sprint service couldn’t connect most of the time.
Sprint’s perfectly happy to sell you phones and service, but they don’t seem interested in investing in the infrastructure that will make the telephones actually work.
Our one-year contract is up next month; maybe we’ll look into getting someone else’s service - one where we can actually make calls in our neighborhood.
Count me in as one of those who don’t have problems with their cell phones. I live in rural SW Arkansas, and even on my way to the nearest larger city (30,000 people), there is exactly one dead spot on the way there, and it’s probably 30 seconds worth of driving long. Even on a two-month-long bus tour of the Western US, there were only a couple of times (once when driving through western Kansas, and the the other time I don’t remember where we were) where I couldn’t make calls. Even the small town in North Dakota had service.
I have AT&T (The new Cingular (the new AT&T)), so YRMV.
This isn’t picking on you in particular, but a lot of people have said something similar.
The burden on you is to either ask if it will work in a certain place, or if it doesn’t work, I don’t see why the company wouldn’t allow a refund within 15 days or whatever. Also, if having 1-2 bars of reception is the problem, then this thread is above my head. As long as I can talk to the person on the other end, and sie can talk to me, I’m perfectly fine. Five bars of reception? Who cares, because the phone’s on my ear anyway.
No, dude, I thought billboards doubled as cell towers, just like how my TV remote works by focusing my brain waves telling the channel to change.
I was pointing out the irony of the fact that Sprint was advertising its service in a location where its service does not, in fact, work, and would therefore be a poor choice for the consumers targeted by the billboard.
Was this somehow an actual whoosh, or are you just being an asshole?
Quite true - what I should have added is that we just moved to this area about a month ago - relocating back here (after six years in Seattle) in order to be closer to my wife’s aging parents. The phones worked fine from our home in Seattle, as well as most other areas in the Puget Sound region (though not in Medina, as I think another poster mentioned).
And the only problem with 1-2 bars is really due to a foible of mine. Once a call has gone beyond a certain length, I tend to stand up and walk randomly around the room/house. Not even aware of doing it, frankly. But with only 1-2 bars of reception, if I’m not careful I’ll find myself in an interior part of the house, and next thing I know I’m disconnected.
Why can’t it be both?
Same here. With 1-2 bars I have to be careful not to turn my head.
At home the only time I use my cell phone is to call the phone company to tell them when my land line goes down. :rolleyes:
You can end up with dead zones in weird areas though. With my old provider, I know of two in the rural area I grew up in. One isn’t too surprising, as it’s in a sparser area, but the other is smack in the middle of our version of ‘downtown’–if there’s one area you’d expect your service not to work, this is not it. When I was at a certain friend’s house, I could never get reception at all (as compared to my house, which is as close to the middle of nowhere as you can get out there, where I could still get a usable signal). Yet a half mile down the road the phone worked fine.