On the road, can you hear him now? Good!

wow what a setup

 

Interesting to read those kind of stories about network testing. Even though travelling along the most travelled/populated routes, it is sometimes worth it to drive on more isolated roads, because cell service is needed there too.

 

they should now concentrate testing in the residential areas.

 

I'm sure they are testing residential areas, jones, but not every residential/industrial area is perfectly covered...sorry.

 

Its good that Verizon does this type of testing to help improve coverage, but it looks like they have some pretty OLD phones in the back of that SUV. They should have some newer handsets, and why do they still have an ATT phone?

 

That was a good read & it's interesting to see how they do the testing, now if they would hire some of us, we could do the residential & in building testing for them.

 

not to mention, if ya still need to improve your major roads and heavily travelled highways after all these years, something is up. e.g. must be major changes going on in the area?? In most areas the so-called "Major Roads" that are heavily travelled are also either elevated, or are fairly wide open. Should be very little need to still be 'optimizing' those areas in my mind, unless something was changing.

just 2 cents.

 

So minus 30 is the best he has seen? He has to be kidding. I know a few places where I've seen between minus 17 and minus 20.

What I don't understand is why they place external antennas on those phones. Obviously that does not replicate the typical environment in which a cell phone is used, and can hide potential problem areas because the phones are normally getting better reception than normal.

 

Thats exactly what i was thinking. The phone on the far right actually looks like an old GAIT phone. If these tests are to be anywhere near accurate, they need to update the phones, get rid of the external antennas, and have several phones for each carrier. We all know that if they pick the wrong phone to test with, the results will be way off.

 

yeah it looks like the old nokia gait phone i had a while back with cingular... and you are right they do need to test with more than one phone from each carrier and take off the external antennas to get a more accurate reading

 

I have found that -106 is the drop out point for my 7400. If this guy has only seen 96, and no higher, he is:

A) Driving in the wrong places
B) Does not know what he is doing
C) Lying

 

From the way I read it, those numbers are just for that route...

As for the equipment they use from other carriers, they will actually upgrade that equipment when the contract update with those other carriers.

 

Their competitors are also doing this.
They all know where their good/bad Areas are.
They all know their Dead Zones.
So what's the Point?

 

This is a hard test to really perform accurately and fairly. But I believe using external antennas is probably the fairest way. The external antenna gives a fairly uniform signal, with less RF signal fading. Afterwards a experimentally determined correction factor (ie nominal reduction factor) for the reduced expectedd signal inside the car, with the phone antenna, can be applied to all the phones. My own tests give this number to be about -10dB.

Otherwise he would have to worry about which phone is nearer the window, in the middle of the car, or has interference with nearby phones. Notice how they place the phones in a shielded metal box to minimize the nearby effect I suppose. I also think the external antennas normalize out the the effects of each phones internal anttenna design or whether one has a stubby, verizon pull out or just by internal antenna design alone (and there are lots of designs). Probably the RF amplifiers sensitivity are the same for each phone, but a good tech can and should measure that and also correct and normalize each phone too.

 

Probably b/c the old ATT and Cingular networks aren't seamless yet. This will take a few years.

And it may still be under contract.

 

-106? Mine starts looking for service at -103dbm. So far the best I have seen is -39dbm. And that was directly under a Sprint site. So this guy has seen no worse than -96dbm. IPCS says that means your phone is recieving a very strong signal. And we should be happy for what we do get. -96dbm is about average around here, unless you can actually see the site. I have been testing with my 7400 for about a month now. IPCS's signal around here fluctuates by about +/- 10dbm. This is something I dont see in Sprint corporate markets.

 

The worse I've seen is right here at home. It was -111dBm from guess who: T-Mobile.

 

I win! Wait, that's a bad thing, isnt it?

 

So -96dbm and - 10db correction from the antenna would give -106dbm. So maybe he is just quoting directly from his readouts, without any corrections. This might explain it, or as WirelessBeachBum said, it may be just for this route.

This guy is trying to test signal strength at locations, not testing phones. I think he knows what he's doing.

 

or it's still Testing TDMA

 

I've made a call with -106 on my old LG.

 

They should hire Taxi cabs to do this testing. Taxis really drive all over and can collect a lot of data in a short period of time. Imagine dozens of taxi cabs driving with their testing equipment in the trunk collecting network data. Since the equipment collects data automatically while making calls and has GPS, the taxi driver doesn't need to stop his job. At the end of the day, the network operator just goes to the taxi base and downloads the collected data from the computers to analyze.

Crazy idea isn't it?

 

It's not crazy, it's good. The only problem is where to put all of that equipment. Taxis need all the trunk room they can get.

 

Yeah....I realize that. But I figured that with advances in technology, things can be made small enough to fit anywhere.

 

Besides the space issue, I think its a great idea. If i were in charge of the testing, i would seriously consider that idea.

 

Most testing are also Done by 3rd party groups,
like Outsoucing.
So one trip route data can be sold
to 3 or more carriers.
So it saves them Money already.