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RE: Wireless call quality matters and that's bad news for AT&T, good for Verizon, Sprint

rallcorn 14th Sep 2010

@matthew_maurice

I've been told that the reason for the poor call quality is due to the moving over to GSM, what AT&T believed to be the "next" popular cellular medium for consumers.

It turns out that we didn't "buy it" ... the USA, I mean. Apparently, the GSM coverage is a good technology, and it is widely used overseas, but AT&T doesn't "own" the whole band ... just a part of it, which is where the delimma lies.

In areas like San Francisco Bay, or even Austin Texas, you can have full bars on your signal strength and still get service that is likened to a poor connection. The problem is the "hand-off" between cells. When the cell channels available are limited, your hand-off just may get dropped by a tower that has run "out of" available cells, due to the traffic in that area.

I remember using my AT&T once in the local medical center. The signal just couldn't make a solid call. I stepped out into the parking lot, thinking that was my problem. Once out there I had full bars, like before, but the same problem existed! I took my phone back and went to Sprint/NEXTEL. All-of-a-sudden I had excellent service where others did not! Was it the towers? No, it was the band service. The GSM that AT&T has just couldn't handle the traffic right there in that area.

I've also experienced the sobering awakening when you use an AT&T phone on-the-road! You can be traveling along, utilizing all of the wonderful features of an iPhone and all-of-a-sudden it's like someone "pulled the plug"! NOTHING! Oh, you still have cell service, as in a "phone call", but your data? Forget it buddy ... it's history! You're in "the sticks" now! (with AT&T's GSM) Apparently, the other carriers, since they use TDMA/CDMA, they have a broader coverage area and better tower coverage ... and you "still have" your data when roaming out of the metropolis!

Is AT&T bad? No, but I wish they'd incorporated CDMA/TDMA into the iPhone alone with GSM to make it a multi-band phone ... data and all! Now, that would be "sweetness"!