20/20 Cell Phone Test

To do a test accurately they would need to test all carriers with different handsets in different areas for at least 3 months. This would be kind of prohibitive so you would have to keep it confined to a city or, maybe a county. I don't know, it seems like a waste of time to me. You know where you can use your phone and where you can't.

 

Bobolito, I agree with you.

I think that this 20/20 news story shows what happens when a few journalists do a "scientific" test. They are clueless.

If the journalists who had done this story had spent a few moments doing a Google search, chances are they would have found WA, HoFo and other forums. A few PMs to people like Bobolito would have at least gotten them headed in the right direction.

Clearly they failed to do even this very basic investigation before they set off to do their story.

Just remember this example the next time that you hear the news media claiming health threats or pending natural disasters. A few minutes on the Internet can provide any of us with the background information that the journalists never bothered to check.

 

I don't think it's a bad way of putting it at all. It is my experience that tower outages are very rare around here and that is my personal observation. Obvioulsy I know it can happen at any time though.

 

Re: Cell Phone Report on 20/20 tonight...

FWIW, the only places where I've seen pilot pollution unquestionably cause service problems are a) high-rises and b) mountainous areas where a phone can see numerous cell sites (areas north of Dahlonega, GA come to mind...VZW phone shows full signal but can't get a call out, and going into the debug screen shows the phone cycling among PNs like crazy)

The "sudden drop" phenomenon in CDMA seem to be caused by a huge number of things, including true capacity issues, neighbor list problems, excessive handoffs causing the phone to "lose" the network (not necessarily caused by pilot pollution), buggy handsets, etc...but I've seen sudden drops happen in AMPS, IS-136, GSM, and iDEN as well (I can name lots of places where AT&T, Cingular, Nextel, etc. consistently drop calls, even where stationary.)

-SC

 

Pilot pollution shouldn't cause echos...the usual cause of echo problems is bad echo cancellers at the carrier's switch.

-SC

 

The problems I've experienced in NYC with Sprint range from capacity issues, to temporary outages. They don't happen often, but they happen more often than they used to when I had TDMA . In my example before, when I was on Greenwich Village, the Sprint phone was searching for service for a while and then found Verizon in analog, then switched to Verizon in digital, only to drop a few seconds later finding Sprint with a very weak signal that was useless. After that it gave up and switched back to Verizon. I don't know what was happening that day, but if the Good Houskeeping guys that did the test for 20/20 were there that day, they would've falsely reported this area as a dead zone from Sprint. I know for a fact that's not a dead zone. They were obviously just having a problem that day.

Pollution is not a CDMA exclusive problem. Just go on any NYC bridge and your T-Mobile/Cingular GSM phones will become useless. This didn't happen with AT&T TDMA, but this doesn't mean that TDMA is inmune to this problem. I just means that better engineering can take care of these issues. NYC bridges are high and phones can see too many towers from there. As you drive through a bridge, you can see your signal is full and the call fading out at the same time until it unavoidably drops.

 

Re: Cell Phone Report on 20/20 tonight...

You mean the ENTIRE ISLAND OF MANHATAN?

For those who are not in Manhatan on a daily basis let me explain something.

1. ) Times Square/Midtown = 1 square mile with 2 million people who all have cell phones. Capacity problems abound no matter witch carrier you have.

2.) I can sit at my current desk and WATCH cell breathing happen. The fact that I am 4 walls inside of a building on the corner of 42nd street and 7th avenue realy helps. Examples, from 8:30- 10:00, 11:30 - 1:30, and 4:15 to 5:30 don't expect me to be able to maintain a call for too long. Expect it to ring 4 times and go to Voicemail. Thats just how it is were I am. These are also the times when the internet runs slowest.

 

Interesting. When did you start using Sprint bobolito? I guess Sprint has more problems (temporary outages, failures) in the East than they do here in the West. I haven't seen anything like that happen in at least 3 years here.

 

I don't really own a Sprint phone, but my partner let's me use it all the time. Been using it since 2001.

Sprint has improved a lot in NYC/NJ. Back in 2001-2002, capacity issues were constant, especially calls going directly to voicemail, or sometimes the voicemail didn't respond at all.

 

Here's a replacement link:

http://platano.ath.cx:8002/video/20-20.mpg