Child Item

Site Totals

61264 Questions Answered 267 Categories

Let us solve this Verizon Service Quality debate for good

Motorola Droid here.

I don't frequent this forum too often, I probably glance at it once a week or so, but it doesn't take a regular visitor to take notice that this forum is always peppered with 3G complaints, some more or less valid than others. However, after reading through a couple different threads tonight I'm afraid I'm going to have to hop on the bandwagon and question my 3G speeds.

First off, I saw somebody say that 90-100 dBM isn't very good. I am always stuck at around 98 dBm in my home though, and when I'm out and about I find it never gets below the high 80s. Is this normal? Also in my Settings>About Phone>Status menu, it constantly says I am on an "Network Unknown." This occurs and remains constant despite any combination of settings, including roaming being on or off, and whether or not I am on 3G, 1X, or WiFi.

Speaking of WiFi...when I am at home I use my home router as opposed to 3G for obvious reasons, which is a NETGEAR N router, yet I still only average about 2.5 mbps when connected to it or any wifi elsewhere. Yes, I have tried turning my routers security off, and yes, I do have it in b/g mode. I have also done the 228 number thing, the disabling of voice privacy suggestion, turning roaming on/off, several factory resets, etc.

Basically I'm just curious to know if anybody else is having similar issues, and what your average speeds are. Infact, I'm going to make a little form below this paragraph for anyone who is interested, and rename the title of this post. Perhaps we can congregate enough responses to come up with an average and then determine whether we are receiving acceptable service or not:

Phone model:________

What is your...

Average 3G download speed? _____dBm

Average WiFi download speed? _____dBm

Any other comments that are pertinent___________

Comments

demmo86rt

I haven't been tracking my speeds so I can't really comment on that, though I do know that you will always get worse reception inside than you will out. I think that you have started a great thread and will check on it often to see what kind of numbers you come up with.

reallyniceguy

I used the speed test app. 675 kbps (not consistant, sometimes more and sometimes less)trough 3g done in the middle of the night and one bar of service. wifi I got 3.5 megs dowload. I never notice my phone being slow even at 500 kbps. I notice my bars of service go up when i connect wifi, not sure if its because the phone is just picking up digital and 3g gets turned off. I never had service issues tho, even at 1 bar, everything works fine.(i live in a rural area of texas)

DucksDroid

I think that you are confusing two different things.

1. dBm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DBm which is strength of the wireless signal

2. Bandwidth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandwidth_(computing) which is the amount of data that you are moving

The two are mutualy exclusive. It like saying that you radio in your car gets the data from the station faster if you have a better signal. As you know this is not true. With a better signal there is a greater chance that the data will get through (less retries) but not that the data is moving faster.

AZSALUKI

first...how do i check my signal and speed? do i NEED an app or is there somewhere on the phone to do this? (i've seen others talk about 85-95 dBM, but never knew how to check). let me know and i'll post the results.

also, one other thing you can try....and i MUST stress that i know little about this, except that it seemed to have improved my quality (voice/sound....my phone sounded "muffled" on both ends) on both ends, but i'm not sure if it actually increased my signal strength?

call ##778

select "edit mode"

enter the password: 000000

go into the "cdma settings"

change home page," "home orig," and "roam orig" from evrc to evrc-b

hit menu and "commit modifications."

from what i gather, evrc-b is better technology, but is not supported everywhere. so if you try this and your signal is worse (or gone) then you'll need to follow the steps to switch it back. you will also want to save these instructions to your phone in case you find yourself somewhere that appears to be getting poor or no signal, so you can switch it back.

budone

Incredible

Wifi speeds 11/1

3G speed 384k/140k

Signal strength -99

budone

AZSALUKI wrote:
first...how do i check my signal and speed? do i NEED an app or is there somewhere on the phone to do this? (i've seen others talk about 85-95 dBM, but never knew how to check). let me know and i'll post the results.

Menu>Settings>About Phone>Network

Signal strength is listed there.

AZSALUKI

incredible

signal strength -65

3g download 2.15 mbps

3g upload .95 mbps

wifi download .57 mbps

wifi upload .44 mbps

am i to understand that my wifi is actually slower than my 3g connection? if so....why would i ever turn on wifi??? please understand i know VERY little about this, but i tested everything twice to be sure i got similar results. the wifi was from my router at my office (which is dsl and i've always felt was a bit slow). i also noticed that i can change the measurement it reads (mbps is what i selected).

budone

AZSALUKI wrote:
incredible

signal strength -65
3g download 2.15 mbps
3g upload .95 mbps
wifi download .57 mbps
wifi upload .44 mbps

am i to understand that my wifi is actually slower than my 3g connection? if so....why would i ever turn on wifi??? please understand i know VERY little about this, but i tested everything twice to be sure i got similar results. the wifi was from my router at my office (which is dsl and i've always felt was a bit slow). i also noticed that i can change the measurement it reads (mbps is what i selected).

Make sure your phone is locking on that router. When I went to post my numbers, the connection was extremely slow. I found out my phone chose a connection 3 houses away.

tim600sl

3G speeds: Highest I ever got was 1.55 megs for download. WiFi speeds: Highest I ever got was 6.81 megs!!! So definitely my wifi is much faster.

demmo86rt

Ok, I did some speed tests today. I did three at lunch at work and three at home after work. At work I was outside and at home I was in. This was also in two different metro areas. All six tests hovered around 1 meg d/l and went from 600 - 900 k for up. My signal strength also didn't vary much, -84 at work and -72 at home. A side note about signal: on a CDMA network like verizon the dBm is a neg number so, like in my case -72 is better than -84. Also, I don't know about other phones, but since the 2.1 update for the Eris, there's not a real good correlation between signal bars and actual signal strength. I really would love to see the variation between different phones and different areas as I have a feeling that some of our speeds might be dependent on the quality and/or distance of the network landlines between cell towers and verizon's servers.

AZSALUKI

i know ducks droid said signal strength didn't affect speed.....but at work i'm at -65 and get 2.5 megs and at home i'm at -90 and get just under 1 meg of speed. is that just a coincidence then.....or is it because of the tower i get the signal from? i don't understand this stuff....lol. all i really know is that browsing on this phone seems faster than my pc!!! maybe i'm just not picky....but this phone seems BLAZIN fast to me. i hit a link and boom!!! i'm there.

demmo86rt

I would have to imagine that large differences in signal strength would translate to some speed differences, though I could be wrong. The whole tower to server thing is just a theory on my part and I would love to see a large, controlled sampling from different areas, just for curiosity's sake.

DucksDroid

We actually removed the signal strength graphs from a piece of hardware that our company produced because it caused customers to react just like people here are. There are several things that can cause bandwidth to suffer. Signal strength can be one of them. If there is not good signal retries can go up since there is not as good of a path to the device. It is also possible for one bar to have full bandwidth if none of the packets are dropped. But, other things can cause bandwidth issues, such as the number of devices that are connected to a tower and the amount of bandwidth they are using (just ask Steve Jobs, his Iphone demo did not go so good because of the same affect). Was your phone syncing or checking for updates or getting new map data, bla bla bla. As you can see these are all uncontrolled test and will only reinforce whatever people are already thinking. People can only rely on their own experiences to determine if they want to keep the service or switch providers.

I like my Droid and do not plan on switching.

AZSALUKI

i was reading a live blog of the iphone demo. pretty funny stuff. now obviously know what you're talking about so answer this.....when the wifi was overloaded and jobs asked for any suggestions and they guy yelled "verizon"....jobs pointed out that he was using wifi so that wouldn't help. when i read the blog and later heard the sound bite, i thought to myself "why didn't he just disable the wifi and use the network?" was this a **bleep** question? am i the only one who is thinking that he didn't bother trying that (and nobody suggested it) because he KNEW he'd get no signal???? i mean, i just thought to myself "if i were demo'in my htc, i'd just browse with the 3g." like i've said...i don't know much about all of this, but i just figured he coulda used the ATT network....IF he thought he could get a signal.

demmo86rt

And that's what I love about this thread, maybe it will give some people a chance to see how good verizon actually does over a large number of areas. Before you sign any contract, you should do some sort of research. If verizon really doesn't work for you, then fine, go somewhere else, just remember you DID sign a contract and there's no guarantee that the other guys are going to be any better. We have amazing phones on one of the better carriers, but you're always going to hear the complaints more than the praises. I, for one, haven't had any major issues, even though I'm using the dreaded Eris. I might just be lucky, but I like to think it's because I'm careful and I get my info before I mess with my phone. I try to find out what something really means before I fly off the handle and I don't mind doing some troubleshooting when something does go goofy. Ok, enough ranting, I think you get the point (there's really nothing good on TV tonight and my wife's not home, sorry.)

Child Item