I’m hoping for a factual answer, but I’m assuming I’m going to get more opinions so I put this in IMHO.
I live in a high-density, suburban neighborhood. It’s all homes and green spaces, with a creek and a community pool, etc. Nothing industrial in the immediate area.
I go for a walk most mornings and listen to Pandora or internet radio. There is one spot I walk past where I lose my cellular signal every single time. It returns after maybe 30 seconds. It’s very consistent. I am walking down a residential street. Could it be a tower hand-off? Or more likely some form of interference coming from… what? One of the houses? There’s nothing else there I can point to.
No, I could look it up I guess, but I don’t know offhand. All of the houses are two-story, roughly the same size. There’s nothing unusual about the spot where I lose coverage. Nothing taller than the surrounding structures. No especially tall trees or anything.
I would agree that it sounds like an obstruction or a tiny sliver of space between tower coverage. I have a friend who lives in a neighborhood just like you describe, and there is no cell service in her upstairs left bedroom. The rest of the house is full bars, but that one room (and just outside the door) is a complete dead zone.
It sounds like a bad handoff from one cell site to another. Call your carrier’s Technical Assistance Group and have them do a ticket on it. They will send someone out to drive test the area. If you don’t report it, they can’t fix it.
Dead spots can be caused by some weird things. There’s a zone in my town with a couple of stores and restaurants and a medical practice that sits atop a significant rise and oversees valleys in two directions, including the major cell towers. Line of sight, little more than dense trees blocking things in a few arcs. Verizon, which is so strong in our backwoods area that Public Safety uses it as their backup communications system. On that rise… 1/X signals. Remember 1/X, before 3G? It’s a huge PITA to eat lunch at those restaurants or wait in the doctor’s office with virtually no data signal, and none has guest WiFi.
The explanation, from the PS guy who manages their systems, is that it’s a granite outcropping with enough metallic content to suck the signal dead. Nothing much that can be done without sticking a relay tower on top of that rise.
Cellular is just basically radio, so anything that causes RF interference could be to blame. If you were in a building I’d look at the building material…most likely something in the construction is interfering or blocking the signal. Outside as you describe could be either signal strength or some sort of bouncing interference pattern that basically renders a small area a dead zone. You’d really need to do an RF scan of the area around the dead zone and a pattern analysis to really know what’s going on, but that seems most likely. Find out who has the nearest tower to where you are at and give their tech support a call with the GPS location of the dead zone. They might be interested enough to go check it out and they might be able to do something about it depending on what it is.
Woman: I’m standing in my living room and I have zero bars. I can literally see the cell tower 1/4 mile away in the middle of the cornfield! If I open the door I have five bars!
Tech: Do you live in a stucco house?
Woman: Yes, why? What does that have to do with it?
Tech: Congratulations. Your house is a Faraday Cage.
Thanks everyone. It’s much more an oddity that I ponder every time I pass through it then an annoyance big enough to contact the carrier. I would feel weird asking them to investigate why I can’t get Pandora for half a block on my daily walk… I have to admit I was hoping the answer was a nefarious subterranean laboratory one of my neighbors built without informing the HOA…
Well, could be one of your neighbors with a signal masker…or someone who is broadcasting on the same frequency used by the cell tower. Maybe the ghost of Tesla is in their basement and he’s unhappy. But radio can be odd, so I’d guess it’s interference patterns or something along those lines. No need to feel weird about telling the cell providers…they want to know about dead spots. At worst they will just shrug and tell you there is nothing they can do.
This makes me think of the problem we have in our house with the wireless connection. We’ll have like zero connect ability in just this one spot (where my wife and I have recliners for watching TV of course) and just move a metre away, and problem goes away. Two different routers and a booster and still the same problem.
No problems with data/cell service in that area though.
FWIW, I deal with these type of problems on an almost daily basis.
The company I work for makes an Internet-connected lighting controller, which uses cellular communications. Since these units are in a fixed spot, they are much, much more susceptible to signal issues than mobile devices (on your cell phone, if you don’t have good signal, you can walk a block and be fine, but that’s hard to do when you are bolted to a cabinet).
I once had a system that would get perfect signal if the door of the housing was open, but when it was closed, it got no signal. The odd thing is that the antenna was on top of the box, and the door didn’t extend to the height of the antenna - except for the smallest of lips. All I could figure is that the signal was bouncing off of a fence, and hitting the unit from slightly below, and when the door was closed, that little lip was enough to block the signal.
I hate dealing with this stuff - it’s invisible, and impossible to get decent tech support from our providers (AT&T and Verizon, and their roaming partners).
