Cell Phone Reception
Our recent trip to North Carolina was a lot of fun and a great learning experience in a lot of ways, some more obvious than others. One less obvious way was about cell phone reception. I have been a T-Mobile customer now for over three years in the Washington DC area. Up until a couple of months ago, I had a Sidekick, which has HORRIBLE reception, so when I switched to the Treo 600 a couple of months ago I didn’t have any complaints about the Treo's reception.
T-Mobile does not serve North Carolina, but rather has roaming agreements with Cingular. Now, maybe I just lucked out and Cingular’s service in NC is their best in the country, but man, the reception I had on our trip was the best that I can remember ever having! I had 4 bars 90% of the time and only once remember looking at my phone and seeing “no service” and that was in our room at the B&B in Black Mountain. But everywhere else, whether it was in a larger city or town like Durham, Greensboro, or Asheville, or a smaller one like Black Mountain, the reception was stunning. Even deep inside the hotel we stayed at in Durham, the reception was a perfect four bars! I’m suspecting that Cingular might use the 850Mhz band and since the Treo 600 is capable of receiving this, it will when offered the chance. For those unfamiliar, 850Mhz is a frequency used by some GSM (a cell-phone communications protocol used throughout most of the world but not by Verizon and Sprint here in the U.S.) phones which is supposed to penetrate buildings much more so than the other bands of GSM.
The other part to this is data. It’s one thing to have good overall reception, but if you have a phone that does data communications (internet apps like web browsing, email, etc.) like the Treo, the Blackberry, the Sidekick, etc., that data connection is very important. Well, as it turns out, the data connectivity was much better in NC than it has been here in the DC area. My problem with reception here in DC is that often I will try to do a data connect to check email or go on the web, and the Treo will time out trying to obtain a data (GPRS) connection. Sometimes the only way to get it to work is to either reset the phone completely or to go into Verichat, a instant messenger application for the Treo that somehow can recover a data connection when other applications can’t. When I was in NC, however, none of these problems occurred. I would say 99.9% of the time I would get a data connection when I asked for one, no problems whatsoever!
I have issues with T-Mobile and how they treat their customers, but really is any cell phone company that different? They’re all in business to make money and customer service is rated among the worst of any industry. Often you have to make choices based on many variables, such as whether you’re actually committed to a provider via a contract, whether your provider offers the phone you desire, and yes, local reception. Maybe Cingular has horrible reception in the DC area like T-Mobile does, I don’t know, but it was a very eye-opening experience to see how cell-phone reception could be, and it wasn’t even in a huge metro area, but all across a state. Then again maybe that’s part of the problem. Big metro area have a bazillion people who are on their cell phones every other minute. This must tax the networks incredibly.
So, I’m not sure if moving to Cingular would do much of anything even if I could (I’m currently in contract for another 9 months). T-Mobile does have one of the cheapest plans both for regular service and for data and roaming, so that’s a concern too, since my bills are already high as it is and would probably go even higher. I think the only solution at this point would be simply to stay with T-Mobile but move to North Carolina! That way I could enjoy the benefits of better reception but still keep T-Mobile’s low prices!