Can You Hear Me Now, Oxy?

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Author: Tyler Kearn and Caroline Olsen-Van Stone

With phones filling our pockets, we set off on a grand adventure-one that would send us to the far reaches of campus, an adventure of signal strengths and call quality. We were testing phones-how well they performed, where they did and did not get reception and how they compared to each other-to find out which of the carriers really did have the best network, at least at Oxy.

We got our hands on phones from each of the four major carriers-AT&T (which includes Cingular), Verizon, Sprint (which includes Nextel) and T-Mobile.

Convincing people to separate from their phones, even if it was just for a few hours and for official newspaper “research,” was a challenge. It took much coaxing to part people from their social lifelines, persuading them that if they did get a call, we would let them know. (We also assured them that we would not go through their address books and start calling their contacts at random.)

It’s surprising how vulnerable you feel when you do not have your phone-something could happen that you might miss out on, and it suddenly becomes much more difficult to arrange to meet your group of friends for dinner in the Marketplace.

But, with much determination, we were able to part enough people from their precious phones and set off on our testing.

We wanted to test the phones in places that people frequent, but also where we would get a range of both good and bad signals. We wanted to establish a baseline call by calling in areas with strong reception and, of course, find places where reception is awful.

We tested the phones in 10 areas: the academic quad, in front of the library, in one of the library study rooms, the library stacks, the courtyard of Booth, Sycamore Glen, the Rangeview gym, the front of Newcomb, between Norris Orange and Yellow and, yes, the top of Mt. Fiji.

We wanted to test at least two phones from each of the carriers, so we could evaluate them knowing the fault lied with the service and not the phone. Unfortunately, we were only able to locate one Sprint phone after much searching. We know Sprint phones are out there, but they really seem much more scarce than we would have expected. We did, however, manage to get a good variety of old and new phones, ranging from blocky, antenna protruding, camera-less dinosaurs to iPhones and Pocket PCs.

Testing was a very embarrassing affair. We would stand with two of the phones 10-30 feet apart, obviously talking to one another, and our conversation was always about how we sounded to each other. Our methods earned us many skeptical and baffled looks.

In our testing, we noted a few objective numbers, like how many signal bars a phone showed (which, inconveniently, is not always out of five or any indication of the quality of the call itself) and how long a phone took to start ringing once its number was dialed (which we figured would roughly tell us how far away that carrier’s cell tower was).

We also took down a very subjective number, our ranking of a call’s sound quality on either end, for each phone. We would rank the calls from 0 to 5, with some very obvious rankings (0-would not make call, .5-dropped call, 1-parts of conversation cut out) and some that were more vague distinctions, such as whether a call was scratchy, “echoey” or hollow.

Some of the locations with the best reception were those you would expect. The middle of the academic quad was one of the few places where the number of bars shown did correlate to the call quality. Likewise, the front of the library had very strong reception where the calls sounded good, and the top of Mt. Fiji, which sports two cell phone towers and has a view of the entire area, had some of the best calls anywhere.

Some locations yielded surprising results in the call strength and quality. The study room (room 120, to be exact) in the back of the first floor of the library had very good reception, and-though we used soft voices to avoid disturbing people-we still had very clear calls. The front of Newcomb got very high scores, even besting places like the front of the library. Sycamore Glen sported very good calls, despite that, geographically, it is a valley surrounded by hills-the calls there did take a really long time to go through and the phones showed weak bars, but the calls themselves sounded as good as they did anywhere else.

Then there were some places on campus where phones just could not make calls. The worst place by far was in the library stacks in the tiers on the first floor, across from the student lounge.

No Sprint or Verizon phone could make or receive calls at this location. If a call was attempted, a “service not available” message would appear, and if called, the phones would not ring and the call would either go directly to voicemail or was dropped. AT&T phones could make and receive the occasional call, but the calls that were successful had significant static and cut out parts of the conversation or were dropped entirely. The T-Mobile phones performed surprisingly well, being able to make or receive calls that, while scratchy, were at least functional.

Another place where reception left much to be desired was the Rangeview gym. All of the phones showed a very low signal at this location. Despite this, some of the phones still sounded clear when used, including the AT&T phones, and especially an older Verizon phone.

However, other phones, including a new Verizon phone, did not work, either displaying error messages or dropping calls. The strangest error message we encountered came at this location from a T-Mobile phone, which told us “Emergency calls only!” Apparently we could make non-emergency calls again once we went to a new location.

New phones did not necessarily have better reception than older ones. In fact, an older Verizon phone (the one with a protruding antenna and lack of camera) ranked better than the others, besting the Apple iPhone and a Windows-Mobile Pocket PC. The fanciest, most expensive phones sounded only average, or worse. The Pocket PC, a T-Mobile Wing, constantly emitted a horrible headache-inducing ringing-in-the-ears noise that made using the phone hard to bear (though this noise might have been an issue only with this specific phone).

The majority of the phones, and this included phones from manufacturers ranging from Samsung to LG to Nokia to Apple, sounded mediocre, distorting the caller’s voice, making it hard to recognize the person and muffling their voice at times.Comparing the carriers, one highlight was the strength of T-Mobile. T-Mobile is not known for having the strongest network, but their phones seemed to get a better signal and have better quality in almost every location, even in the stacks where the other phones would not work at all.

After T-Mobile, AT&T had fairly good quality, at least trying to work in places with bad reception before ultimately cutting out conversations and dropping calls.

Verizon was solid but not spectacular-surprising considering their boasts of having the best network and the premium that their customers pay for that reason. Verizon phones were inconsistent, providing some of the best and worst calls. Verizon phones had an especially unreliable signal strength indication, giving some great calls from terrible bars and showing full bars where the call quality was awful.

Sprint is harder for us to judge, because we only used one phone on that carrier. However, Sprint seemed very inconsistent, with call quality again seeming unrelated to signal strength. Two places would both have fantastic reception, but then in one the phone would make a great call, while in another it would sound funky with the same displayed signal strength.

People carry around a large variety of phones, from complimentary contract-binding phones to phones that have lots of bells and whistles, but people rarely stop to consider how good the calls actually sound on their devices. All of the phones successfully make calls, and none of the carriers have reception that doesn’t work in places you
would absolutely expect it to, but some of the phones sound distinctly better on both ends of a conversation, and it is not always the phone you would expect.

Believe us, after carrying around more phones than anybody should and being on the end of more bad phone calls that we would ever like to, we know your life could be that much better with a good phone.

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