Sugnal Strength and Voice Clarity

[Frito]

A fmaily memeber of mine has a cell phone from a CDMA cell comapany. I will not name it so that no one gets offended! Anyways, the phone wills how FULL signal strength, however when u try to hewar the peson talking on it, the voice gets trunked, or all u hear is bits and pieces. The phone has been checked out numerous times and the store tech says that sometimes its just a bad chanel or a bad router at the tower site. Is this true, anyone know why it would do that? I use to have a TDMA cell phone and it would do it ALL the time. I know that just cuz ur phone shows full signal dosent mean its ok, alot somes into to play such as noise floor, amount of calls on the cell site and ect. but i cant seem to figure this one out, anyone know?

[IdiOTeQnoLogY]

personally i think it may be the phone regardless of what the tech says. or it could be the carrier in that area is having problems.

i use sprint (cdma) up in the northeast and when i have a full bar i never get that robovoice effect. on my old phone when in low signal areas i would get robovoice or choppy audio at times....my girlfriend who has voicestream (GSM) would also get bad audio in low signal areas (cutting out etc)...

however i have had a new cdma sprint phone for the last month which id been told holds signals best; and even in low signal areas in which my old phone may have started to sound choppy i now enjoy clear audio [img]i/expressions/face-icon-small-smile.gif[/img]

i am no technician but i figured id give u these experiences as a basis.

[larry]

I've heard that some brands of phones will display the gross signal strength and not the actual uesable signal strength. The actual signal strength can decrease without showing it on the indicator if too many users are on a cell site at the same time or if the site is having technical problems. This situation is not very common though.

[Frito]

Well thanxs man, i appriciate ur advice. WHat ur saying is also what iam thining, but its a fairly NEW Qualcom phone, after all werent they one who invented CDMA, or i also heard qualcom phones work best with CDMA signal. As a matter of fact it is sprint who i was refering to, but see my family memeber asked like 3 other people if they had the same problkem and 2 of them said yes, one said no??? Oh well who knows.... thanxs again

[Frito]

Larry,
Well ive heard that too! BUt no one could ever tell me what brand of phone it was? Do u know what brand of phone this is true for? I KNOW its Nokia because i have 2 nokias, one for Verizon and One for AT&T and they both are super accurate with the signal. Also i read in another thread that u asked why people have 2 or 3 cell companies? well in my case, i have fmaily members who are senior officials in AT&Ts wireless part. So i get a free phone and free service(unlimited anytime night and weekend, and mobile to mobile minutes, free roaming, free LD, free new phone every year!), so i figured id get it anyway so when i have to make long distance calls or long calls ill use the AT&T. but i have verizon cuz iam not to happy with AT&T, poor signal and voice clarity around my house, and in ALOT of buildings, so i got Verizon. AT&T sits at home on the charger until i need it!

[larry]

The Qualcomm/Kyocera phones do display the gross signal strength. I use a Kyocera myself and have found it to be the best phone I've ever used.

[Lance]

Bandwidth - on any digital network data will be lost when the capacity is overtaxed. To blame the phone is incorrect; it will only convert into analog (voice) the digital data that actually arrives to the handset. Unlike analog transmission, the digital signal strength is not necessarily the limiting factor for voice quality.

Granted some digital phones have better voice quality once the signal is converted back to analog.

Garbage in however equals garbage out.

[Dukedog]

Now keep in mind that every 100 phones that are made about 10 maybe be defective, so that doesn't mean that the Vendor, who makes the phone are not good phone makers, now some might have not mastered it, like Nokia with cdma, But now they will be fine thanks to Qualcom chip, even then they might have a few model that are defective.

[Frito]

Yes i would have to agree. No phone is as good with CDMA as a phone with qualcom in it. Although i do have to say, my nokia 5185I has been GREAT to me on Verizons Network. I used to have a Audiovox CDM8000 i thinkit was, now that phone was awsome. It would pick up signal anywere and everywere, even in places were my nokia has to go onto to AT&Ts AMPS. I also agree with what was said about how a network can only work good when its not overloaded. Bandwith only allows for so much of it to be used, so when u start pushing it it gets bad. The only soulution i see is 3G technology, or MORE cell towers and MUCH more Spectrum. But the Goverment is not going to give up that Spectrum easily so it might be a while id think.

[Gman]

I've heard phone quality described as a classic bell curve. Given 1000 phones most would perform near the center of the 'bell' (ie avg-good) while others are at the edges of the 'bell' (poor or possibly excellent). This is just a statistical distribution of production errors/variables that can occur with any product. The data points of poor,avg,good,excellent are measurable but not by the common man without alot of $ in sophisticated equipment. A complex device like a cell phone has so many integrated circuits that it is likely for some components to be less than optimal. The manufacturer does qa to ensure that no phone will be sold that lies below a certain threshold on the 'poor' side of the bell-curve but it seems it happens where they get by the test and are sold anyway.

G.

[Lance]

To say there are 10% defect rate is gross exaggeration. Batteries are a totally different subject and do suffer higher failure rates. Most of the so-called defects are result of improper operator handling and abuse. Handset failures do happen, but are the exception and not the rule.

[larry]

I have to say I agree with Lance on that one.

[Wayne]

Ya..............I think Lance is right too.