I had never had problems in Canada on my iPhone with my provider. I could in fact take an elevator ride 2 stories into the basement and continue a call. I recently moved from one suburb of Vancouver, BC to another and all that changed.
At the new neighbourhood I couldn't get service standing at my front door about a mile in line of sight of the nearest tower. After a long and ugly fight with the provider, I was able to cancel my service for half the ETF and move to another provider using an iPhone that I presume connects to the same towers and works as expected. I definitely wasn't happy with the result.
I've noticed that the 5 bar system does not work well for diagnosing actual signal strength and reliability: the display updates too slowly to be of actual use when signal is a problem -- watch people waive their phones around while they try and make them work. The bars don't represent the signal it's getting now, but some normalized value of the last little bit of signal.
At minimum, it would be nice to have an app that does a good job of diagnosing and explaining your current network situation. I'm sure it already exists, I'm just not aware of it.
Comments
I had never had problems in Canada on my iPhone with my provider. I could in fact take an elevator ride 2 stories into the basement and continue a call. I recently moved from one suburb of Vancouver, BC to another and all that changed.
At the new neighbourhood I couldn't get service standing at my front door about a mile in line of sight of the nearest tower. After a long and ugly fight with the provider, I was able to cancel my service for half the ETF and move to another provider using an iPhone that I presume connects to the same towers and works as expected. I definitely wasn't happy with the result.
I've noticed that the 5 bar system does not work well for diagnosing actual signal strength and reliability: the display updates too slowly to be of actual use when signal is a problem -- watch people waive their phones around while they try and make them work. The bars don't represent the signal it's getting now, but some normalized value of the last little bit of signal.
At minimum, it would be nice to have an app that does a good job of diagnosing and explaining your current network situation. I'm sure it already exists, I'm just not aware of it.