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Dunlock

macrumors newbie
Jan 24, 2014
1
0
I use an iPhone 5s and am having the same issue at work. When it switches to 4g I lose imessage for a minute or so and Safari needs to be refreshed. It doesn't seem to be as much of an issue going from 4g to LTE. This happens several times in a five minute period of time. I would like to force the iPhone to only use LTE until it is no longer available. Going to the "stronger" 4g signal is not a benefit to me either.
 

hancox

macrumors member
Dec 22, 2011
88
67
I can replicate this daily now. Have lte at work. Get in elevator, and once I'm out, I'm on 4g. Flip airplane mode in same exact spot, and lte.

Clearly a bug. On a 5S AT&T
 

kelub

macrumors regular
Jun 15, 2010
136
45
Don't discount the possibility that your nearby towers could be degraded. After having consistently terrible service at our new home last year (to the point of getting a MicroCell) I placed a call to AT&T to try and figure out why my service was so bad.

Having been the "person in charge of mobile devices" at my last job a few years ago, I learned with our Nextel/Sprint phones that cell phones (not just theirs) don't just pick a tower and stick with it. They typically jump from tower to tower every so often, even if you're sitting still. Back then, we had this problem where you could be on a call for a few minutes, have 4-5 bars, and then without moving the call would just drop. It was because we were on a hill and there was a tower *just close enough* to register being there, but not close enough to sustain service, so when the phone hopped to that tower, the call dropped. We actually had a maintenance code we could put into the phones that would disable the option to change towers so we could troubleshoot. Obviously you can't leave it in that mode when you're driving or walking around, or else you drop a call every time you get too far away from your initial tower.

Anyway, back to the AT&T call. I asked about the towers around me, and deduced just by observation that my location was equidistant from all of the surrounding towers. She said that was correct, I was pretty much perfectly located as far away as possible from all available towers, but not far enough away to be incapable of receiving adequate service. She then said the towers themselves had been degraded significantly and were due for maintenance. She referred to some significant storms we'd had over the spring time and said that the weather had apparently impacted the towers' effectiveness. It can take months from the time a tower is reported "degraded" and when it actually gets serviced. She was able to give me an estimated maintenance date for the towers in our area.

While I do still use the microcell (I have it now, so why not) I have noticed that when it's offline the service is acceptable/usable without it (compared to pre-maintenance.)

I've also noticed that my phone seems to spend more time on 4G than on LTE when I'm at work / in the car. I'll have to take a look at Passbook and see if that helps it. We use MobileIron for our device management, though, and it has a "hook" into location services which has it enabled rather often, so that might also be the culprit.

I've also noticed that my ability to use data while on a call is practically non-existent anymore - the data either times out or is so slow it's not worth the trouble. That used to be such a selling point, so I'm disappointed that it seems to be an issue now. I get that the call itself goes over "4G" but it'd be nice if the LTE antenna would still work for data.
 

CEmajr

macrumors 601
Dec 18, 2012
4,448
1,228
Charlotte, NC
Don't discount the possibility that your nearby towers could be degraded. After having consistently terrible service at our new home last year (to the point of getting a MicroCell) I placed a call to AT&T to try and figure out why my service was so bad.

Having been the "person in charge of mobile devices" at my last job a few years ago, I learned with our Nextel/Sprint phones that cell phones (not just theirs) don't just pick a tower and stick with it. They typically jump from tower to tower every so often, even if you're sitting still. Back then, we had this problem where you could be on a call for a few minutes, have 4-5 bars, and then without moving the call would just drop. It was because we were on a hill and there was a tower *just close enough* to register being there, but not close enough to sustain service, so when the phone hopped to that tower, the call dropped. We actually had a maintenance code we could put into the phones that would disable the option to change towers so we could troubleshoot. Obviously you can't leave it in that mode when you're driving or walking around, or else you drop a call every time you get too far away from your initial tower.

Anyway, back to the AT&T call. I asked about the towers around me, and deduced just by observation that my location was equidistant from all of the surrounding towers. She said that was correct, I was pretty much perfectly located as far away as possible from all available towers, but not far enough away to be incapable of receiving adequate service. She then said the towers themselves had been degraded significantly and were due for maintenance. She referred to some significant storms we'd had over the spring time and said that the weather had apparently impacted the towers' effectiveness. It can take months from the time a tower is reported "degraded" and when it actually gets serviced. She was able to give me an estimated maintenance date for the towers in our area.

While I do still use the microcell (I have it now, so why not) I have noticed that when it's offline the service is acceptable/usable without it (compared to pre-maintenance.)

I've also noticed that my phone seems to spend more time on 4G than on LTE when I'm at work / in the car. I'll have to take a look at Passbook and see if that helps it. We use MobileIron for our device management, though, and it has a "hook" into location services which has it enabled rather often, so that might also be the culprit.

I've also noticed that my ability to use data while on a call is practically non-existent anymore - the data either times out or is so slow it's not worth the trouble. That used to be such a selling point, so I'm disappointed that it seems to be an issue now. I get that the call itself goes over "4G" but it'd be nice if the LTE antenna would still work for data.

AT&T has been throttling data speeds during voice calls for some reason. That's why the connection is so slow and borderline unusable when on call now.
 
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