I was in a remote location inside of one of the stores in the Ontario Mills Mall in Southern California today. For the most part, the Sprint service in the Ontario Mills Mall is quite good. I was in a location at the very back of a store that didn't have Sprint Service. I figured, no problem because my phone was indicating that I was roaming. I made the incorrect assumption that I was roaming on Verizon and that I wouldn't have a problem making a call because I had three bars of signal. WRONG! I kept trying to initiate a call and kept getting a message stating "LA-10 Unable to Complete Your Call". I couldn't understand why this was happening. I decided to dial "611" and I got a message saying "Hello, Hello, Hello" and that I had reached MetroPCS. My phone was roaming on MetroPCS!! Shouldn't the Sprint PRL have preferred Verizon? I sure hope so because MetroPCS is not very well deployed in Southern California. I am running the latest Sprint PRL. Maybe there wasn't any Verizon signal and MetroPCS was the last choice from the PRL. I would appreciate input from anyone that understands what happened here. Thanks, -jim
Well it seems that you found one of the very, VERY few spots in the world where both Sprint and Verizon signals were dead, and Metro PCS was not. Congrats. Dont worry about it.
Ontario Mills has always been a mall that's been a challenge to get a good signal everywhere inside. I'm not surprised that you found a spot where neither Sprint or Verizon would pick up. However I am surprised that you landed on Metro considering that they don't have an antenna any closer to the mall than Sprint does.
It could be a DAS antenna although I wasn't aware that any of those type had ever been deployed at Ontario Mills. Sprint was never able to get permission to put any up there. Sprint uses two freestanding towers to cover that mall. One at 9528 Richmond Place in Rancho Cucamonga (North) and 4663 Guasti Road (South) in Ontario.
