We'll have 5 bars and a few blocks later no bars. Forget about using it from the house. Our friends can use their Verizon phones in our house, so we're going to switch to them soon.
This is how CDMA phones work in my area. Less than a block away everyone I know with Sprint and Verizon get great coverage but the moment they step within 5 feet my my house, no coverage whatsoever. It is as if I live in a CDMA blackhole.
On the other hand, AT&T and T-Mobile work wonderfully in my neighborhood and pretty much all over Portland. There are however a few dead spots but they are usually no bigger than a street corner.
I travel all over the place with my TyTN II (and my TyTN before that and my Jamin before that) and must say that I've been extremely happy with the service I've received since joining the BellSouth family in 2000 (who became Cingular and are now AT&T). Maybe I'm just lucky.
All over North America I extremely often get 3G, and it works plenty fast for my email and tethering needs. I have also enjoyed 3G in Europe, Japan, Hong Kong and Australia, and experienced good service even in Barbados earlier this year. Last week I was in Honolulu and got just fantastic service!
I test my speed (DSL Reports) every so often and got 1 Mbps in a local restaurant a few weeks ago. Of course, my wife's iPhone 3G got 1.1 Mbps, but that's neither here nor there.
I just got a CradlePoint CTR500 and it rocks the house! Testing my speed (Speakeasy) through that got me 2.3 Mbps! Now that is blazing! ...and I don't think Verizon can match that yet.
I'm on Robbers (Rogers) and my signal is spotty. I was recently in Toronto for a very short while (stopover at Toronto International) and the signal was spotty. I go to Calgary every once in a while and the signal is spotty. On the trip I recently made to the UK and Ireland, the only time I lost the signal was when I was on the London Underground (I had a signal most of the time I was on it, even several stories underground!) or on a plane.
I travel all over the place with my TyTN II (and my TyTN before that and my Jamin before that) and must say that I've been extremely happy with the service I've received since joining the BellSouth family in 2000 (who became Cingular and are now AT&T). Maybe I'm just lucky.
All over North America I extremely often get 3G, and it works plenty fast for my email and tethering needs. I have also enjoyed 3G in Europe, Japan, Hong Kong and Australia, and experienced good service even in Barbados earlier this year. Last week I was in Honolulu and got just fantastic service!
I test my speed (DSL Reports) every so often and got 1 Mbps in a local restaurant a few weeks ago. Of course, my wife's iPhone 3G got 1.1 Mbps, but that's neither here nor there.
I just got a CradlePoint CTR500 and it rocks the house! Testing my speed (Speakeasy) through that got me 2.3 Mbps! Now that is blazing! ...and I don't think Verizon can match that yet.
In your travels you must not ever go into the rural Midwest. Here in SD Att&t is not even here, and since they shut down the analog I don't know if the phone would even work outside of Sioux Falls, wich does have GSM service from Unicel.
I am on Sprint since they came here in July 1999 and have had excellent service where I live, work and travel.
I can always tell someone is on GSM when I geta call, call quality is subpar compared to CDMA
I am with AT&T. I work from home, and now days I have a hard time finding a fuel station that has fuel, so I spend a lot of time at home (I only drive on weekends). That being said I have excellent service in the one spot at which I stay all day and 5 signals durring mu commute from my bedroom to my office and back.
We dropped the landline back in 2000 when we moved to Westerville (Columbus suburb), Ohio. Since changing to Sprint at that time, I have had minimal coverage issues in Westerville and the last 6 years in Dunlap (Peoria burb), IL. Sprint's maps seem to be fairly accurate. The only time I had a problem was when we first moved to Illinois. The signal inside the house was poor but the handsets we had were several years old. We upgraded (my wife picked up a Sanyo 4900 [outstanding reception!]) and have had no additional problems yet.
Obviously, building construction, type of functioning equipment, and magnetic fields plays a role when evaluating reception inside a building. My Fortune 100 employer began using "anti-WiFi" paint on some walls to prevent much of the WiFi signals from penetrating outside the building. I am sure that has an effect on cell phone signals.
It is interesting -- everyone in Peoria raves about Verizon's coverage. It could be my company issued handset but my experience with Verizion reception has been piss poor. Sprint's coverage is only supposed to cover major metro areas and major thoroughfares but my Sprint reception is soooo much better than Verizon's on even secondary routes.
I'm on AT&T now (iPhone). I was on Verizon for 2 years before that, and then Cingular for 2 years before that, and then Verizon for 5 years before that (yes, I bounce around...a bit). 2G coverage is pretty much identical between the two in this area (with the exception of the Metro, which is CDMA-only) - both have about 98% coverage, although the dead zones are different.
However, VZW beats the pants off of AT&T for 3G. My wife still has VZW, and whenever I can't get 3G, she always can. AT&T has a lot of ground still to cover.
Might see if you can get friends with different AT&T phones plus other providers to stop by and look at how they compare.
I don't have a lot of experience with this, but three of the four phones I have used with my at&t sim here had great coverage, while one (JasJar) was essentially unusable from home/office and in many parts of Austin, TX.
The wisdom of others indicated that it was a radio band limit of the JasJar.
I've been with some flavor of AT&T/Cingular for almost a decade now, suffering Capital Punishment here in the western suburbs of DC
I have a good friend who used to be a Tower Service Engineer and taught me many useful things. One was that if you have poor service -COMPLAIN! LOUDLY & OFTEN!
It's pretty simple really, the phone Reps are trained to tell you that they can't do anything more than forward your comments on the weak signal at your house/work/commute etc, and they can NEVER tell you what, if anything is done about it.
Here's the trick, they actually DO do something!
If you look at the 3G service map for Cingular around my home, you would see a bizarre little 'finger' of coverage that reaches out from a local tower, past the coverage boundary that spreads from the line of towers that runs for several miles north and south. That 'finger' reaches out for over a quarter mile, and ends 50 yards past my house!
It's no accident, it's calling month after month, and pointing out that we have not one but two people here with full freight service plans that are thinking of jumping ship for Verizon if they don't extend the 3G coverage, which annoyingly, ends just a quarter mile up the road. It helps to point out to a Supervisor or two that AT&T spends a ton of money trying to attract clients like us, and can't afford to let us go.
Remember, most of the bread and butter accounts are not major money makers, but Smartphone Users are the most profitable customers they have.
So, as my buddy explained, the calls go to their service dept, which will send a Tech to the tower and test it. Assuming it's working ok, then if they are tired of going back month after month, or if the Customer is important enough to them (and paying over $250/month/house makes you VERY important to them, they will 'tweak' the antennas to try and send some more signal your way. Then an unmarked van will cruise by your house and verify the effect of their efforts. A few days later, you realize that hey, I'm getting 3G everywhere in the house and yard now!
I sometimes think we should form a Consumer's Group, and send some Reps to the Cell companies and demand the respect and attention our accounts deserve
I live in Peoria, IL where outside of the city limits quickly turns to farmland. We have all of the major carriers here and most of them claim good coverage. However, I know people with At&t, Sprint, and US Cell and all of them have complained about their lack of reception. I have Verizon and rarely have problems with reception...even in the farmland areas. I want the version of the Diamond that Sprint is getting, but there's no way I'm leaving Verizon's service just for a cellphone.
AT&T all the way
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