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Comment by roxgib | Hacker News Reader

It wouldn't be so bad if phones were better at switching to the best available signal, they they could use the efficient 5G connection when it's available, but fall back to 4G when the 5G is blocked by a building or something (which I gather is more common due to the high frequencies used in 5G). But they seem to insist on connecting to a crappy 5G signal even if an excellent 4G signal is available. Same with 3G, which is often fine for many tasks.

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This is inexcusable. I thought my phone was defective for weeks. I would get ZERO data, move 100 yards and have data again. After some Deep Thought™ I disabled 5G and could magically use the Internet from my phone again.

One of the things that sucks are devices that use standalone 5G but don't support carrier aggregation on those bands. It's possible network will steer towards an over-congested low-band or a weak mid-band signal, but it cannot combine and make the best of both. These devices are better served using non-standalone 5G or sticking to LTE.

Same experience here. It was extremely frustrating to realize that I have to play a game of whack-a-mole with my phone's settings to make the damned thing usable.

Phones seem to optimize for the fastest network instead of network quality. At least on Android it's possible to manually override and select a network through the hidden settings menu accessible through the phone dialler. Just hit ##4636## and you're in.

Can you explain more provide a provide a link. This is the bane of my existence. My phone has two towers in range, one with essentially no signal and another one with four bars and it prefers the low signal Tower. It also prefers my home Wi-Fi even if I am taking a walk around the block. It is infuriating that I have a 50/50 chance of resolving a website like Hacker News with a flagship smartphone in the Bay Area

HN is eating asterisks in the code. See https://www.todoandroid.es/en/android-mobile-code-what-is-it...

Yeah I have this issue with WiFi as well, every time I'm leaving my house I pull out my phone as I'm walking down the street to play music but I have to wait for the one bar of WiFi to disconnect

Does not seem to work on Samsung and Huawei.

Unfortunately "switching to best available signal" is a really hard problem. More so for a device in motion and on really short waves like Ghz frequencies.

I always get annoyed when people nag around about WIFI - because they cannot understand how many things happen in radio communication even if you sit behind the laptop and you have router in other room and you have 10 neighbors having their laptops/routers also running. They expect stuff should "just work" and reality unfortunately is much more complicated.

> I always get annoyed when people nag around about WIFI - because they cannot understand how many things happen in radio communication even if you sit behind the laptop and you have router in other room and you have 10 neighbors having their laptops/routers also running. They expect stuff should "just work" and reality unfortunately is much more complicated.

Oops, maybe don't have a look at my comment about then then[0]. :)

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34569334

I thought that might be the case, but if higher frequency 5G signals are susceptible to small black spots due to buildings etc what's the solution? Presumably they aren't going to deploy enough 'microcells' to cover every place that the cell towers can't reach, so are we stuck with more dead zones if we use 5G?

Side note: I have the same rant for laptops, wifi and 5ghz/2.4Ghz. If a network is on both most clients will just prefer the 5ghz no matter the signal quality/packet loss.

As a user I'd rather have a working slightly slower connection than a broken faster* one.

*Not actually faster due to packet retransmission time from packet loss

Even on 2.4GHz the internet connection is usually the limiting factor anyway, unless you're on a high speed network with a lot of congestion.

I wonder if 4G is better now that people who are really enthusiastic about bandwidth usage have moved up to 5G.

For most operators, spectrum is dynamically shared between LTE and 5G, so probably no.

Most? Verizon uses it heavily, AT&T uses it slightly in a few of their markets but has been phasing it out, T-Mobile does not use it.

I have an iPhone 13 Pro Max here in Taiwan. If my 5g goes to 4 bars it switches to 4g.

Is that what you mean?

Yes, please share your secrets with us!

So this is basically boils down to false advertising, which is the real problem here

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