My parents are in the Caribbean at the moment, and threatened to send me cell-phone pictures of white beaches and blue water. They were thwarted in this by the fact that I still have a cheap LG flip phone with no camera. Our calls from home are exclusively made using a landline phone.
You can see the reason why in the picture at right. This was taken in our living room the other night, and as you can see, we get barely one bar worth of signal in the house. This is fairly typical– there are a few spots in the house where it rises to two bars, but an intermittent “no signal” is fairly common. On the rare occasions when an incoming call actually manages to make my phone ring, I have to go outside to take it, because the reception is so bad. Most of the time, it just goes to voice mail.
In fact, this is fairly typical of our whole neighborhood. I get no reception in the Niskayuna Co-Op, or at the gas station next door. And a series of spot checks while walking Emmy this morning never found anything above two bars.
So that’s why I don’t have a fancier phone: in the places where I spend most of my time, it would be essentially useless to me. I’d still have to pay for landline service in the house, but I’d need to be shelling out more for a cell-phone plan to support a better phone. Unless a newer phone is somehow magically able to make good connections through crappy signal, it would be a waste of money.
Also, if you see that smarmy guy from the Verizon commercials anywhere, punch him right in the face for me, will you?
I didn’t have a cell phone at all until I went on my first book tour in 2007 because prior to that I spent nearly all my time at home, so why would I need one? Since then I’ve begun traveling enough to justify the expense of one (I compare it to the cost of hotel phones and/or the aggravation of finding a public phone and using a phone card), and I find that I actually hardly ever use the phone function at all, but that I really do need the e-mail/texting/Internet presence. So in that respect the Droid X I just got makes more sense for me than a basic cell; I have the bare minimum phone call plan, and then load up on data and tethering.
And I hardly miss using the phone; when I get a phone call these days, seven out of eight times I’m just puzzled why the person didn’t just send me an e-mail (the eighth time, it’s my wife, who I enjoy talking to on the phone).
None of this is applicable to you since your home cell reception is terrible anyway, mind you.
Maybe you’re holding your phone wrong (a la iphone 4).
I don’t quite travel enough at the moment to justify it on those grounds, and the cheap cell I do have works well enough on the road to avoid hotel phones and the like. For email and suchlike, I have a tablet PC that I take with me, which is a little slower, but has a full keyboard and a screen bigger than my two thumbs, so it’s much more pleasant to use.
The one genuine snag I’ve hit is that the pre-paid minutes plan we’re on now with our cell phones didn’t seem to work in parts of Canada– it was OK in Toronto, but I couldn’t dial out from Waterloo, while a previous trip to Waterloo when we were on a more expensive plan worked fine. That was pretty annoying.
You might take a look at Verizon’s Wireless Network Extender. I don’t have any personal experience with it, but it is essentially a mini cell tower that hooks up to your home broadband connection.
Likewise. In fact, I have a pay-as-you-go phone from Virgin Mobile, and I think I paid $15 for the phone itself. Also, the partner feels strongly about keeping our landline number (we’ve had it a long time) and I think also wants to keep his cell phone number. The only problem is that the Sprint network stops at the U.S. border, so in Montreal I either borrow my hosts’ phone or use a pay phone (those calls being almost all of the form “Hi, I’m through customs, I’ll meet you at the metro”).
If anyone really wants to send me cell phone pictures, they can email the things or put them on Flickr.
Simply get a cellphone that uses wifi, I’m sure you have that don’t you? Solves my signal problems.
the problem you are having with verizon’s reception can be fixed with a simple upgrade.
all you need are two empty cans and a loooong string…
heh.
Chad,
When you are in Canada, you are actually using a Canadian partner (usually Bell, Rogers or Tellus) and unfortunately their plans are all over the map and usually not to the benefit of the customer 🙁 I’d certainly send off a complaint/query to your carrier. The other thing is that a few years back I had to change phones because our previous phone had no more local support (I live in the Waterloo region), so maybe that was the same problem with you.
John,
Even though you are puzzled as to why they called, maybe they enjoy talking to you on the phone too, and so their puzzlement is actually as to why you are puzzled 🙂
Cheers.
Wow.
I guess I’m spoiled by excellent cell phone coverage in Ukraine. I hardly remember last time when I didn’t have working phone connection. It worked even when our car was stuck in the woods.
Alex, you’d be surprised how backwards cell phone systems are in the US compared to Europe. And don’t even dream of popping a sim card out of the expensive blackberry and into the $15 cheapy when you go out into the woods.
ATT has a femptocell system now. I’m considering getting one to backup a spot where signal is sketchy. Mainly to have my smartphone fully functional.
I find this truly bizarre. We also live in Niskayuna, and we also have Verizon, and I can’t recall anywhere in the Capital District where anyone in the family has had difficulty with reception.
We did have trouble getting a signal from the middle of nowhere in Berkshires yesterday (on Route 143, the Lafayette trail, roughly midway between Northampton and Pittsfield), but that was actually a big surprise, because we have been so spoiled by the ubiquity of connectedness in our day-to-day lives in the Capital District, as well as in all the major cities we regularly visit.
I have to wonder if your ancient phone might be a contributing factor (or if, somehow, we have just been miraculously lucky) not to have connectedness problems.
Alex: Most countries have better cell phone reception than the US. Here, it’s not just the remote areas (I can understand not putting cell phone towers in an area otherwise designated as wilderness) but sometimes even big cities (forget about using your mobile phone on underground sections of San Francisco’s BART system). Part of the problem is that we have several privately installed (and not always mutually compatible) networks that cover some areas well and other areas not-so-well. Being in mountainous terrain doesn’t help, of course, but that excuse doesn’t apply to New York’s Capital Region, which is in a broad river valley.
Ten years ago my neighborhood was a notorious dead spot, and that fact delayed my acquisition of a cell phone by several years. The cell phone companies have since added more towers in my area, so that at least for my current provider (Sprint) I have no problem getting a signal at home. Wander off the main highway corridors, though, and watch your signal strength drop.
Huh. I was actually much taken by the nostalgia of that phone display. Kinda like looking at Windows 3.11 again……
Verizon’s the only game in town?
Well you’ve beaten me, I have no bars most of the time at my house. Price I pay for living out the middle of nowhere in western NSW! Oh well… still have the interweb.
Different providers get you different signal strengths at different locations. Have a friend with a different provider come over and check his or her phone. If that provider gets you better bars, go with them. In my experience, Verizon is crap. Not only is their signal no better than anyone else, they lock down their phones so you have to pay more or use their inferior services, their customer service is miserable and their web-site is designed to frustrate.
I switched to AT&T (got an iPhone 4) and it has been great. I get 4 bars where I used to get 1. In the parts of the Boston area I’m usually in, I get a strong signal and good 3G reception too.
Although it’s perfectly possible to coordinate with others while traveling without a cell phone, my experience is that everyone who has a cell phone has given up on all the methods that worked just fine a decade ago: nobody wants to pick a time and place to meet up at the end of a day in a conference anymore; instead people just want to be called on a cell. Couple that with the disappearance of public phones and I had to give in, too. But similar to Chad, I have an office with almost no reception and a lab specially designed to be RF shielded, so no reception. So land lines for most calls. But for my minimalist cell phone, I’ve been very happy with a pre-paid service from Page Plus Cellular, which runs on the Verizon network, which has the best coverage where I am (and, I found out, it also has the best coverage where my family vacations). Use almost any old CDMA phone, or buy a refurbished one from them, and as long as you buy more minutes every 4 months (100 for $10 or 400 for $25) your account stays alive.
Modern smart phones serve plenty of purposes other than making phone calls. The most recent version of android is a complete replacement for a gps device (at least in the US), and is quite usable for email/browsing/etc on any wifi network. Most of them have pretty good built in cameras and video now (always important when the kid is doing something cute and you forgot the camera).
To be fair, it’s possible that the antenna circuit in your phone is actually somewhat busted.
And new phones are actually able to work in weaker signals, as they have more CPU power to run more accurate and elaborate algorithms.
You can try and see if a colleague with a newer verizon phone gets better reception in your house. 🙂
I read some of what you wrote and I agree. I also agree with punching that smarmy guy from the Verizon commercials. If i see him I WILL PUNCH HIM. lol.