We’ve had a family plan with T-Mobile for a few years and for all that time my son’s phone - a Nokia 3220 - has always had better reception than any of the other phones. Our contract is running out so we’ll probably all get new phones and we’d like to all have the better reception. One salesman said my son’s phone must be a “quad band” phone and that all the new phones are “quad band” so there should be no problem. Is this true?
Is there any other way to know that the new phones will have the better reception?
it depends on where you live, like a rural area. or some older phones can have interefences with electronics around the house. but how big of a difference are you taking about? if its a major difference then its probably the phone thats the problem. i doubt if you get a good phone with your next plan that you will have this problem
I got myself one of the newer LG phones last year from Verizon. It has been excellent in its functions.
Just don’t try using any cell phone in Death Valley. No towers there.
Cell reception is a frequent difficulty in my area, and the people who sell the phones tell me that every phone has exactly the same reception ability as every other phone, which seems pretty unlikely to me. But, although it seems obvious that one could compare phones carefully in an experiment, I have only found that word-of-mouth and the occasional comparison when several of us are driving around together and curious seem to be the only available sources of information.
Though, comparing providers on the basis of which towers their phones can use would seem to be important.
And just to clarify, quad-band, tri-band, etc. have ZERO to do with reception quality. Any given cell provider in any given area uses one band for all their towers. A multi-band phone will use that one band to talk to every tower, and the other bands are unused.
The value of multi-band comes in when you travel to a place that uses different bands.
A good argument could be made that all else equal, a more-multi-band phone would have less good reception on any given band that a less-multi-band phone becasue of the compromises inherent in squeezing more bands (frequency ranges) out of a single antenna & receiver.
OTOH, the more-multi-phones tend to be fancier and more fully featured and may have the better radio and antenna than the single band cheapos.
I know of no source giving consistent measurements of signal stength & reception quality across the various brands & models of phones.
Hey Plan B
The Nokia 3220 was a middle of the road phone as far as reception went. If you’re getting good reception from that then most of the new T-mobile phones are going to work very well for you.
The salesman who told you that all the new phones are quad bands and that’s why your son is getting good reception was either ignorant of the facts or just plain lying to you. All of the new Motorola’s we sell are quads and most of the Nokia’s are but not all of T-mobiles phones are quad bands or even need to be. In reality the only situation where a quad or tri band phone is going to help you is when you are traveling out of the country.
If you would like to send me an e-mail I can look up your area and let you know what kind of signal strength you can expect and then recommend a few phones that would fit your needs.
Thanks for the info. It’s very frustrating to be an unsophisticated customer here. Reception is one of the most important features for us, and it’s too bad that you can’t just get a rating on that. Also frustrating to get misinformation from a salesman. I didn’t trust what he said, that’s why I started this thread.
I gave you a few recommendation based on your e-mail to me. I also checked your area for new towers and you were right, they put up 4 new towers near you in the last 90 days! I hope that I was able to help you. If you ever need any more help let me know.
Hey t-mobileguy, would you be willing to advise me too? I’m a T-Mobile customer and thinking about a new phone (owing to the extreme suckage of my current phone). Would welcome an expert suggestion or two.
Not a problem. I’m going to be in meetings all day on thursday and friday but I will be more than happy to look into it on saturday for you. Let me know where abouts you live and what you would like in a phone and I’ll give you my thoughts. If you don’t feel like posting feel free to drop me an email with the details.
