You know, I don't recall ever seeing 1 bar of signal strength on a smartphone. And once it's down to 2 bars, it barely works, if at all.
Human brains: wow, what a bunch of suckers. Damn.
By the way, is it legal to be deceptive in this way?
Human brains: wow, what a bunch of suckers. Damn.
By the way, is it legal to be deceptive in this way?
I do.
I'm from Germany, land of perpetual EDGEing. Highest total GDP in the EU but can't build a mobile network for the life of it.
Then again we somehow forgot how to run trains and build cars without cheating, so I guess it fits.
Want to see a single bar? Come visit, our carriers aren't on the list with that inflate flag enabled. I guess they didn't get the same memo as the car manufacturers ;D
> Then again we somehow forgot how to run trains
The mobile networks don't have enough dB and the trains have too much DB?
I still can't get over the justification for abandoning the €9/month universal ticket experiment (and replacing it with a €49/month offering which has since been bumped to €58/month and will soon be raised to €63/month) officially being in part that "rail will be worse when more people use it" (the other mostly being "not enough people used it to demonstrate its value" and "people used the ticket for trips they otherwise wouldn't have been able to afford to make").
We should just nationalize it all properly and make it free at point of service. Let tourists use it for free too, obviously. Infrastructure exists so the economy can happen, its ROI is a functioning industry and society so stop trying to pretend we can reasonably measure its success in profit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afsluitdijk
Yet, when we visit family in Germany, five minutes after crossing the border we are in a cellular dead zone.
Perhaps the route being so busy is the cause of the connectivity issues, but it's still baffling to me how bad it is, given that the amount of mobile devices trying to connect must be very predictable.
I'm pretty sure the in-train internet also relies on mobile networks, so that's unreliable too. Plus any bandwidth is taken up by people scrolling through tiktok.
The short version is that the chancellor we had in the 1990s didn't like how the public broadcasting channels were talking about his failures and wanted to push the development of private broadcasters (who being beholden to financial interests rather than objective news coverage mostly spoke favorably of him) by prioritizing cable television over fiber. A surprising number of things came downstream from that pivotal decision, e.g. the completely braindead way we sold frequency bands (which resulted in some literally remaining unused because there were initially no requirements to actually do anything with them).
GDP per capita (or GDP per square metre) would be a more useful indication here. Otherwise, you could throw a bunch of poor countries together--just for purposes of statistics, and expect a better mobile network?
However Germany is still very high in both GDP per capita and GDP per land area. Roughly on par with the UK, and far higher than France which has a much better mobile network
Well, it would be the best metric, if your country was homogeneously populated.
If everyone lives in one big city and there's literally no one in the rest of the country, then I expect mobile reception (and every other service) to be pretty good for everyone, because they all stay in the big city.
> However Germany is still very high in both GDP per capita and GDP per land area. Roughly on par with the UK, and far higher than France which has a much better mobile network
Yes, France, Germany and UK are all equal enough in these measures (well within an order of magnitude) that the much bigger difference in mobile networks is most likely due to some other factors.
Sometimes the reception is good but the data rate is poor because of too few towers per person, or because the cellphone companies connections to the wider internet are saturated.
GDP per square metre only really works for countries with uniform population density. For example, by European standards, Spain is huge, and basically entirely empty outside of a handful of cities...
Even with the EU single market, mobile phone operations almost always follow country borders. You'll get a different set of providers in Germany than you'll get one km away on the other side of the Rhine in France. Even though some of them may have the same name or the same ultimate owner or both, and even though you can roam on the other side of the border, you'll have a contract with a different entity, and different people will build and maintain the networking equipment.
Conversely, in the US, the major carriers all have nationwide coverage.
Coverage is decent on Telstra, but if you're out of town reception is rarely any good, presumably because there's little to no incentive to improve it when there's no on around to need it.
The few farmers I know have a rough idea of the on-the-ground cell coverage. They say things like "this side of the hill/town" usually. I've seen them deliberately walk to the other side of a silo to make a call.
I assume that the coverage maps are assumed cell-tower-coverage-if-shit-is-not-in-the-way. No surprise radios are common.
Tangent but this is a pretty interesting topic. I've heard people speculate that local politics deliberately prevents such infrastructure, waiting for some kind of kickbacks to make it worth their while. Others suggest that it happens because federal telecom subsidies aimed at improving rural connectivity don't apply, as a kind of retaliation for tribal sovereignty. Way off-grid, ok, maybe it's simply not worth it to corporate telecom, but whatever the cause coverage even in fairly populated areas around Kayenta/Monument Valley is also quite bad in a way that would be infrequent in comparable communities in say, nowhere Appalachia.
Many a suburban parent of smart-phone addicted children would romanticize the whole thing and actually be kind of jealous of a situation like that. Years back and on the other side of the world, tourists were very scandalized about more roads and towers around Annapurna in Nepal.. but of course the locals usually do not actually like to be cut off from the world.
More telecom is probably good despite the evils, but fuck commercial billboards in particular. Those are still creeping closer to the Grand Canyons and Yosemites, and they suck whether it's for multinationals like McDonalds, or for locally owned gas stations or hotels that put cash into tribal communities. Ban them all like Hawaii, and everyone will be astonished to learn that the world keeps turning..
I work with cellular BDA-DAS[1] gear sometimes, and I don't recall the last time I looked at the signal strength display on my phone. It has probably been years.
For me: It either works, or it doesn't work. It is either fast-enough, or impossibly-slow. It's very binary, and the bar graph at the top never told me a damned thing about what I should expect.
[1]: Bi-Directional Amplifier, Distributed Antenna System. In theory, such constructs can make indoor cellular coverage quite good inside of buildings that previously had none. In reality it can be... complicated. And while the bar graph doesn't mean anything, I still need ways to see what's happening as I spend hours, days, or [sometimes!] weeks surveying and troubleshoot and stuff. The phone can report things like RSRP, RSRQ, and some other tasty bits instead of just a useless graph -- and from there, I can sometimes make a hand-waving guess as to what I may reasonably expect for performance.
But that stuff is normally pretty well hidden from view.
A few months ago, I was in a remote area at anchor on a sailboat, about 6.5 miles from the nearest highway through the swamp, with only a few farms and a handful of houses within that radius. With my phone up in the cockpit of the boat and tethered over WiFi to my laptop, I was able to download a movie. As the boat swung on anchor, the download was occasionally interrupted, but when data was flowing it was consistently 5-10 MB/s over a claimed 5G link; the movie downloaded in much less time than its runtime. I assume I wasn't competing with much other traffic on that tower, wherever it was. So my experience was even more binary than yours.
The phone's signal indicator did seem to accurately indicate when it had no usable signal at all, but beyond that I'm not sure it was providing any useful information. And I'm not sure if it could have told me anything of use other than "connected" or "not connected". The very marginal connection was still faster than I had any right to expect for those conditions.
The net is telling me this is because of the aisle after aisle of tall metal shelving and the building itself also has a lot of metal in the construction.
It is quite annoying when you are trying to use the Home Depot app to look up something.
They finally added WiFi a year ago or so.
I hated having to walk near the doors to send a “was it this” question to the wife.
It must actually be tricky to space out towers that sparsely without creating any obvious coverage gaps, but if anyone is up to the task, it's certainly Vodafone (let's not talk about the actual service quality, though).
Wifi-calling to the rescue :)
But one bar is death for Internet - though HN will often load; anything heavier won’t.
Phone calls are hit-and miss without WiFi calling switched on.
Looking at satellite view it is clear that the local municipal water tower is between a huge cell tower near the highway and my house. All carriers seem to lease that same tower only in my area.
It wasn’t like this when I moved in but I guess the carriers consolidated on that big tower near the highway about two years ago.
Radio shadows are a thing I guess.