Why Cell Phones Go Bad

Ever wonder why you don't get reception? For a simple answer, typically user load and tower placement are the reasons reception quality diminishes. Other factors may be terrain, modulation technology, weather, or the phone itself. However, call quality depends more upon network than anything else.

To clear up the mystery, some basic information on how cell phones work is useful. Cell phones are essentially "radios." They communicate to the world by transmitting and receiving voice through cell towers setup throughout the area. And a carrier's coverage is a network of cell sites, each with a tower and base station controller for a range of about 10 square miles.

From a carrier's standpoint, great coverage comes at various technological expenses and certain restrictions that are out of their control. For instance, each provider is limited by the FCC to a number of frequencies it can use in any given city.

Given a limited number of frequencies available in the spectrum, in order to sustain the capacity needed for urban coverage, frequency reuse is required.

To put it into an extreme example, if there was only one tower covering all of New York City, only a limited amount of simultaneous users could use that tower at once due to FCC regulations, say 100 frequency slots. Thus, 100 users at once could use it.

Conversely, if each house had its own tower, 100 users would be able to talk on their cell phones simultaneously in each house. Since each tower now only has a few feet to cover, power consumption is greatly lowered. Once a guest walks to a neighbor's apartment, the current tower would hand off the user to the next tower, freeing up a spot of another person.

Coverage gaps arise when there is minimal or no overlap between cell sites. Ideally, hexagonal cell sites in a grid would cover 100% of the city. However, cell sites are circular in range. Thus small gaps occur when cell sites are next to each other. When user load increases, more towers need to be built to sustain the volume.

Also as mentioned earlier, by using a network of cell sites, transmission power can be lowered. To maintain efficiency, cells ideally provide reception up to the edge of the next cell site. However, signal strength fades the farther a user strays from the tower. And if the user strays too far from the fringe of two adjacent sites, coverage can get dropped.

If coverage is great outdoors but vanishes once inside, a problem could be the transmission power. Since more users requires more towers to be placed, it requires less power to cover a smaller area. The weaker signals will not be able to penetrate buildings deeper.

Additionally, at the expense of power consumption, cell phones use low-power transmitters. Base station transmits at low power to keep within the cell range (mentioned above). So to provide long lasting phones, manufacturers end up trading off power for transmission and reception strength. Together these are all possible reasons for bad reception.

Narrowing Down The List

After deciding a provider and plan, finding the best phone to fit your lifestyle is next. While all consumers are unique, it is safe to say that most likely you'll fall into one of three categories: those who don't know where to begin, those who know what they want in their phone, and those that already have in mind a few models they are considering.

For all of these categories we have developed tools to help narrow down the broad list of available phone. While using these tools, we try to supply you with facts and information and allow you to make your own decisions. So that in the end, you come up with a phone that's fits your needs.

Cell Phone Personality Quiz

For those who don't know where to begin

Our Cell Phone Personality Quiz is a fun way to categorize which group you might fall into. By answering a series of 20 questions about you, we will attempt to find out what is most important to you in a phone and provide recommendations. However, if you'd rather just see the personality profiles and recommendations, you can jump straight to the results:

Cell Phone Feature Search

For those who know what features they want

If you know you want a phone with Bluetooth, MP3 ringtones, in a clamshell design, you can enter those specs into our Cell Phone Feature Search. It will take a list of your requirements and give you all the phones in a table to compare side-by-side. Depending on how specific your requirements, we have a few search options:

Cell Phone Database

For those who know which phones they are interested in and need a side-by-side comparison

And lastly, for the consumers that have narrowed their choices to a list of phones, they can choose specific models to compare against in our Cell Phone Side-By-Side Comparison.

Additional Resources

We have other additional resources to aid our visitors in finding in right phone. Our cell phone reviews provide informative advice on the latest phones on the market. For a different viewpoint, we allow visitors to leave their own user reviews. And lastly, additional lingering questions can be asked in our helpful and active cell phone forum.

Taking Your Number And Running

On November 24, 2003 the FCC authorized the option to allow consumers to keep their phone numbers when switching carriers. However it isn't as simple as it seems. There are a lot of requirements and precautionary steps that need to be taken to make sure the transfer goes smoothly.

1. Existing service agreements still apply

Make sure you want to switch. In some cases, if your current contract isn't over, early termination fees may apply which could be costly. Added to the cost of new phones, activation charges with the new carrier, and other miscellaneous charges, and the extra costs could offset any benefits.

2. Keep a copy of your existing carrier's phone bill

It will save you a lot of headaches. Carriers rely on the billing system to port your number. So in order to seamlessly transfer your phone number over, the exact billing information must be used. If you live on 123 Main Street, it's 123 Main Street, not 123 Main or 123 Main St... exact.

3. Contact your new carrier - Don't cancel your existing plan

Once you've set your mind on it, it's time to contact your new carrier. They will handle the number change. However, to make this process as painless as possible, make sure you do not terminate service with your existing provider. If you cancel your existing plan without notifying your new carrier, the old number may be recycled and reassigned.

4. Backup, backup, backup

When switching carriers you will probably switch phones. Not all phones are compatible with different services, so make sure you have a way of saving your contact information. Your thumbs will thank you.

5. Sit back and wait

That's it. The changeover shouldn't take more than a few hours. A small $3 - $5 fee may be added to your bill for the porting. But by taking these precautionary steps you'll be able to save a lot of headaches.

UK Number Portability

For those who live in the UK, number portability is slightly different; however the stages are similar through all networks.

1. Request a Port Authority Code from your current network

First of all you need to let your current network know you are planning to leave them. Give them a call and request a Port Authority Code (PAC). This reference allows networks to know the number is transferring from A to B.

2. Listen through the sales pitch

Carriers at this point will try to persuade you to stay, giving you a sales pitch offering better handsets, more minutes, and cheaper prices. These go for contract customers, not pay as you go.

However, after the PAC code request has been made, the network will do one of three things:
- Tell you your PAC code over the phone
- Test the code out to your handset
- Post the code out to you. The networks will usually text the code out to your handset.

3. Take the code to your new provider

When you receive your code go to a retailer. Pick out your tariff and phone, and be sure you let the retailer know that you wish to port your number so that they can incorporate the port into the contract.

4. Sit back and wait

Once you have signed for your new contract the retailer may need to hold onto your phone to make sure the port goes through. Sometimes they don't run as smooth as they do.

Number ports typically take between 5-7 days, however if you are bringing your number from pay-as-you-go to contract within the same network, this time usually takes only a couple of hours to 3 days. Another advantage of this is that most times you don't even need to request a PAC code, but just clarify the details with a retailer, depending on which network you are on.

That basically sums up a number port in the UK; however there are some points to note:
- People will still be billed for phoning the network that the number was originally on (For instance, if you brought your number from Vodafone to o2, people phoning you will be billed as if they are ringing a Vodafone phone).
- Sometimes networks incur a charge for issuing out a PAC code.
- If you port your number over to another network and cancel the contract you then lose that number, so be sure that you are making the right decision before you port.

Conclusion

We hope that throughout the process we made your choices a bit easier. If there are improvements or suggestions that would make this guide better, please contact us. We'd like to hear if it was beneficial or worthless. Your comments will be used as guidelines for future revisions.

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