patcat88
join:2002-04-05
Jamaica, NY
kudos:1 | reply to flyingjoey
Re: It's the Network! This used to not be the norm. Now it is. You start seeing nowadays the exact same dead spots on all carriers, since they rent the exact same tower locations, especially in rural and "row of towers down an interstate highway" situations. Also due to zoning code limitations and grandfathering, no new towers can be added in an area, so everyone co-locates on the towers from the late 1980s/early 1990s. The only difference, and these are minor one, would be signal strength (has to be low enough to not collide with another tower), and antenna aiming, and PCS vs 800, which outdoors will only be a difference of 1 bar between carriers. Indoors the PCS vs 800 argument can cause a much bigger bar difference.
This needs to be banned. What was the point of E911's mandatory roaming/hunting for usable signal if all the carriers have the exact same coverage nowadays?
Sprint and T-mobile also rent/have less towers and have lower average signal strengths (signal strength is not always equal to quality on digital communications, VoIP on a 1 mbitps connection and on a gigabit connection will sound exactly the same), and this causes marginal areas to become dead spots and dropped calls, and also roaming/no service inside buildings (again PCS vs 800 argument). Also since Sprint and T-Mobile have less customers, they don't engineer as many towers into their network (frequency reuse/cell sizes) as AT&T and Verizon. Sprint and T-Mobile only need enough towers to provide coverage to most of the area inside each cell, not prevent rush hour "all circuits are busy" messages.
Higher frequency reuse also cause you to get higher signal strengths inside cells, or more of the cell's area will have a higher signal strength, making your phone behave better.
Also Sprint and T-Mobile historically have had more spectrum than the 800 carriers, so Sprint in a suburban flat area can throw up a bigger area tower and carry more customers, meanwhile creating a much larger marginal area around the circumference of the tower, and a much bigger handover area (which will expose flaws in handover algorithms, this is a CDMA vs GSM argument), and the bigger handover area has a higher chance of call drop. |
