Gadgets

UK chiming in here.. phone coverage and bandwidth are very good almost everywhere now and getting better with 5G.

At home I pay £40 ($50) a month for 300mb/sec internet, hundreds of TV channels and a landline. My cell phone bill is £9.50 a month.

I’m ok with this. (Don’t call me)

Of course it is… I was a performance engineer at a large carrier and all of us were surplussed right after they stopped looking into customer trouble complaints. They stopped caring about performance long ago. Add on the minuscule 5G footprint and service is going to be terrible in most places.

Our phones are prioritizing sending data out to all the organizations that collect our data. The background usage of a lot of big apps like Reddit and Meta ones is unreal. Gotta get that targeted ad information out as quick as possible.

Currently in Belltown Seattle with 5 bars of 5g and I have 5.71 Mbps ⬇️7.00Mbps⬆️. Ridiculous.

I'd happily hang out at 3G or 4G speeds if it was reliable... this whole race to super LTE/5000G speeds is a little overkill.

I don't need to watch a 4k movie on my phone.

No lie, having T-Mobile in Austin and going to the surrounding areas sucks!

I wonder if there were some kind of requirement or change at the device level if it would provide any improvement. Like instead of it saying 3/4/5G it just said “X Mb/s” or “connected” (depending on whether you are actively sending/receiving larger amounts of data), so the user could realize “hey, I’m getting less than 1 Mb/s here, so those full bars of 5G signal doesn’t mean shit”.

Definitely not in Hong Kong, here we have full power 7G even at the bottom of the Victoria Harbour.

To be honest I haven’t experienced this at all. It’s only gotten slowly better every year since I got my first phone over 20 years ago.

Is around here, the mast is right there lol

>4g fast enough for most people

>5g can hardly penetrate tree leaves due to wavelength

>push everyone to 5g despite notoriously crap range

>5 is bigger than 4 so it must be better

>hmm weird where did my signal go

I've been saying this since day one, but I'm not the one making billions of dollars on worse service so what do I know. 4g is fast enough for everyone except people who want to stream their Amazon Luna photorealistic VR game on the subway (e.g. nobody). Not really worth being able to watch 4k netflix if you have to step outside to do it. It's almost always throttled anyway because profits, I've hardly had a 5g connection that felt faster than 4g did

I’m in a top 5 population city and can barely get a signal in a two story building. AT&T.

I wouldn’t know as I no longer answer my phone because of the sheer amount of scam calls I get…

And this is why I will never get rid of my land line. Emergency use.

I called them up one day and told them I wanted to cancel a service that has been in the family for over four generations, 100+ years and four changes to the name of the service provider from city owned to government owned back to city owned and now privately owned. When they looked it up they offered me the same services I have now for &10 a month in perpetuity. I took it.

That's was the plan

This only talks about the US. It's a misleading headline, cell phone reception isn't generally getting worse, one part of the world is getting crappier service.

We need to boot the low cost plans off the premium towers. Throttling isn't enough. Let them use 3g.

Wait ya'll getting 5G?😔

I used to never worry about my phone connection, now without waifu it's pretty weak on my home

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*in the U.S.A

AT&T has been great for me (in Jonesboro, AR). They’ve a decent low-band 5G network and are rolling out their midband network, whereas Verizon is still all congested LTE here. T-Mobile is hit and miss, great speeds, but so-so coverage.

I managed a phone shop for 3 years in a town of 75,000 in the UK for one of the 4 cellular networks. The council had to take down a mast while redeveloping a building. This provided coverage to 1 half the town as it has a large valley. A replacement never got put back up. I joined the store roughly 4 weeks after this had happened.

We helped customers report this each day via the website and i escalated internally a million different ways. The installation date was given and always pushed back each time it came around.

You could not get a signal. We told everyone this upfront and offered 30 day refunds outside company policy in case people regretted their choice. I constantly got a-lot of grief for this as our return rates were so high, but it was either that or run or reputation within the community and slowly lose business as word of mouth travels. We found out the network had actually “restructured” the entire internal networking team and that all the reports being completed online were not monitored.

Somehow we were one of the best performing stores in our company and had one of the highest service reviews consistently despite not actually having a mast for half our customers. Its been 2 years since then and they still haven’t put a mast up yet.

Landlines will make a comeback

Use the FCC Speed Test App so you can report if your carrier is providing service at speeds slower than advertised

thank FUCK i’m not alone. it’s usually dookie in the rural area i live in, so i’m not one to be spoiled with great internet, but damn it’s been somehow so much worse!! i’ll never complain again

My Verizon service in 2015 light years better than it is now.

Horrible in Northwest Florida. Horrible.

My phone (verizon, samsung) with 5G is essentially the same as having no signal in NYC.

Coming from a flip phone to the first iPhone to the IPhone 3GS and so on I’ve noticed it getting worse and worse

Watch the cause ends up being star link

I live in a old town apartment in the EU. When I first moved here, I got 5G internet, as nothing else was available. The first couple of days to a week it was bad, but then I guess it got better and forgot I even have non wired internet.

In the last 2-3 months, my internet keeps falling out, my phone reception can literary be non existent and I have 2 sim cards!

Walking through certain streets it gets just straight up disconnected in recent months….

Legit thought my phone was dieing or maybe the weather or snow have an influence… nada, nothing, its legit getting worse!

How the hell is 3G supposed to get phased out over the next few years when there are still big patches within large cities where 3G is all you can pick up? Large swaths that are supposed to be covered by 4G and / or 5G, I may add, but hey wouldn’t be the first time a telco straight up lied about their coverage maps.

I noticed that my calls drop so much more frequently in the last year, and often calls will start breaking up.

I had a theory that since my carrier merged with a bigger carrier they were trying to make their own service obsolete so people would have to switch over to the more expensive carrier.

T-mo towers in my area definitely toggled off channel 71 and killed my service. I bougth a new phone thinking it was that, and it didn't help. I'm trying to swap to ATT, and that's marginally better but not by much.

Same infrastructure, more phones using more bandwidth...

Finite

It’s definitely worse. I can have full bars and no bandwidth in a lot of places

I'm supposes to be on 5g and I live in a perfectly sized city.. but I always harmve 1 or 2 bars - if I'm lucky. Shit's infuriating.