DroppedCall
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Survey says AT&T drops more calls than Verizon, these bar charts don't lie
Wondering which carrier you should buy your iPhone on? There's a survey for that. ChangeWave Research has released the results of a poll that hit 4,068 users distributed across Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint. Among those four, VZW came out ahead when it comes to dropped calls, with 1.4 percent of respondents indicating they'd received one in the past three months. AT&T, meanwhile, came in last with 4.6 percent. If you look only at the iPhone 4 users the numbers change a little, 1.8 percent vs. 4.8, but the conclusion stays the same. No, this conclusion sadly will not get you around your ETF, but maybe making a pouty face at the AT&T store will help. Update: AT&T let us know it has some doubts about these results. We're not statisticians but we will, out of fairness, link over to this GWS survey from last year that showed 98.59 percent success rate for non-dropped calls. How do your numbers compare?
Verizon's dropped 911 calls leave one woman trapped in burning house (video)
We're just hearing of a story that makes that 10,000 or so emergency calls that didn't go through over Verizon's network on January 26 look a little more serious. A house in Silver Spring, Maryland caught fire that evening during the snowstorm that knocked out power and landlines. A neighbor, noticing the house was ablaze, tried calling 911 on his cellphone but couldn't get through. Thankfully he was able to save the 94 year old woman who was trapped inside, but it would be about 30 minutes of repeated dialing before finally being connected to emergency services. Thank goodness for heroes, but maybe Verizon Guy has some work to do himself.
Modern smartphone radio design partly to blame for AT&T, O2 network woes?
Even though AT&T's already committed both carrier and backhaul upgrades in an effort to buck the butt-of-the-joke trend it's been experiencing for the last couple years, there's some evidence that it's a recent trend in the way phone radios operate -- not a lack of overall capacity -- that should shoulder at least some of the blame for the issues. An O2 staffer (O2 carries the iPhone and has coincidentally experienced many of the same growing pains AT&T has in recent months) that reached out to Ars Technica says that Apple's baby was one of the first widely popular phones to immediately drop data connections as soon as transfers were complete and re-establish them only when needed; that tactic saves battery power, but can overwhelm cell sites pretty easily if they're not configured to handle it -- even if there's plenty of spectrum and backhaul available. Other handsets now employ the same strategy, compounding the problem. This seems like an awfully odd thing to miss during carrier testing, but who knows -- we wouldn't put it past anyone to gladhand the iPhone through the toughest parts of the gauntlet.
