Perplexed: troubleshooting dropped calls at home

[eric12341]

Originally Posted by k8e

Hi, thanks for responding to my question.

I'm not satisfied with Sprint's explanation either, since they can't provide any information that correlates with the start of my problems, and it doesn't explain why I get the same bad reception when Roaming Only. I'm in a well populated area with excellent Verizon and AT&T coverage, so I expected to get good reception on Roaming.

Anyone have any ideas to figure out where the problem is actually originating?

Any ideas how to tell which network I'm connecting to on Roaming Only?

.

Just because coverage shows up on the map doesn't mean it's going to be good in your home as well. For example at my house Verizon ,Sprint and T-mobile phones all struggle to maintain a 3G/4G signal and supposedly my house is in a 4G good coverage area (in the case of sprint no 4G at all).

[k8e]

Originally Posted by eric12341

Just because coverage shows up on the map doesn't mean it's going to be good in your home as well. For example at my house Verizon ,Sprint and T-mobile phones all struggle to maintain a 3G/4G signal and supposedly my house is in a 4G good coverage area (in the case of sprint no 4G at all).

Good point. I never had to use Roaming in this location in the past, so I have no prior example of what the actual Roaming reception normally is here.

[eric12341]

Flashing a radio is even easier that flashing a custom rom as it just triggers a soft reset rather than a hard reset. Just make sure it's a CDMA Radio (Sprint,Verizon,USCC) and not GSM (AT&T,T-Mobile)

[k8e]

Sprint tech support Supervisor tells me that it's impossible to force a Sprint phone to roam onto another network. She says that it will never roam unless there are physically no Sprint towers in the area - it will always try to connect to Sprint first and only roll over if Sprint is unavailable. I said, that sounds exactly like the Automatic setting, so what's the difference between Automatic and Roaming Only, then? She said, they are exactly the same thing.

That doesn't sound right to me at all. I didn't believe her, but is she right?

[EyeB]

could be right, i mean since the late 1990s, early 2000s, where there used to be other cdma providers, now it's just verizon/sprint and their subsidaries, if it isn't sprint it'll be one of their smaller companies (or ones that pay sprint to use their towers) or verizon towers and their companies.

so really the only roam it does are on verizon towers :S, i heard people using verizon radio having good results but can't say anything on this myself. But verizon probably doesn't give sprint phones priority so service would be voice only/2g?

edit scratch that maybe... I just remembered I was traveling through nebraska/kansas last month, I did end up roaming, I have no idea whose towers I was on (I actually didnt even see any buildings for like 75miles in farm country). The speed sucked, I mean it was probably in the bytes/s not even kb/s. The voice did connect for calls though. Point is that I've never experienced this before even using the roaming only setting. I may have been roaming using an analog signal? I don't know if the tp2 supports this but it felt like it was using a really old technology