It's comical. I call home when I leave work. We might talk for five or ten minutes as I drive. This requires two or three calls, due to the drops -- on a major freeway with five bars of reception.
My family and friends have similar issues. A couple don't have it so bad because they're on the West Side, where AT&T seems to have built more towers -- gotta keep Beverly Hills & the movie studios happy, you know.
Oddly, we have little trouble with 3G data. I can stream podcasts and use Google maps simultaneously. It's the calls that are the issue.
I have a weird theory about that, actually. I have seen some similar issues in the Seattle area when moving from one part of the city to the next; the signal is at full strength, but the call suddenly drops, almost as if I'm crossing a boundary. Now, I preface this by saying I know little to nothing about the cell phone network handles calls, but thinking about this made me wonder if it had anything to do with handing off the connection from one tower to the next. Maybe it's better to have fewer, higher power towers to minimize hand-off than many low powered ones. Of course, that's exactly what most people don't want: high powered cell towers blasting them with radiation.
But I have to wonder if this problem is exaggerated by the 3G connection maintained by the phone. My dad used to have the same problem in NY (not the city), but he switched to edge and stopped dropping the calls. He just turns on 3G when he knows he wants to do some faster web browsing, which is rarely for him. Maybe you could try turning off your 3G and see if it reduces your problem in LA?
Comments
It's comical. I call home when I leave work. We might talk for five or ten minutes as I drive. This requires two or three calls, due to the drops -- on a major freeway with five bars of reception.
My family and friends have similar issues. A couple don't have it so bad because they're on the West Side, where AT&T seems to have built more towers -- gotta keep Beverly Hills & the movie studios happy, you know.
Oddly, we have little trouble with 3G data. I can stream podcasts and use Google maps simultaneously. It's the calls that are the issue.
I have a weird theory about that, actually. I have seen some similar issues in the Seattle area when moving from one part of the city to the next; the signal is at full strength, but the call suddenly drops, almost as if I'm crossing a boundary. Now, I preface this by saying I know little to nothing about the cell phone network handles calls, but thinking about this made me wonder if it had anything to do with handing off the connection from one tower to the next. Maybe it's better to have fewer, higher power towers to minimize hand-off than many low powered ones. Of course, that's exactly what most people don't want: high powered cell towers blasting them with radiation.
But I have to wonder if this problem is exaggerated by the 3G connection maintained by the phone. My dad used to have the same problem in NY (not the city), but he switched to edge and stopped dropping the calls. He just turns on 3G when he knows he wants to do some faster web browsing, which is rarely for him. Maybe you could try turning off your 3G and see if it reduces your problem in LA?