MY Cell phone doesn't work!!!!!

[Racket_Man]

I was taking care of some changes with my cell phone account today and witnessed the following:

apparently a family was having some troubles with their cell phones. things like dropped calls, no service in certain areas, missed voice mails, etc. all pretty standard stuff and understandable as the area I live in gets rural right outside of town. even I have problems in certain locations within my town (in fact the house I live in is a bit of a dead zone and I know most of the dead zones because I do pizza delivery in half of the area).

Now my town has a well know world renowned temple of American football. when there is a home game there are like 75,000 people in the stadium alone. that does not count all of the people in homes and businesses surroundiing said stadium. so figure a 100,000 people in just say a 5 mile radius.

ALL of their complaints were legitimate up until this point:
"Well we have a VERY hard time getting reception inside the stadium....We could not get a clear signal.......Blargle blargle...."

"WELL MY wife runs a business and WE will make things right ALLLLLLLL the time when there are problems. WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO TO MAKE THIS RIGHT???????!!!!!! WE WANT TO CANCEL NOW!!!!!! YOUI HAVE REAALLY CRAPPY SERVICE I WANNNNNAAAA CANCEL NOW!!@!!!!"

The associate and the couple go round and round about canceling service with the acssociate saying she could not waive the cancelation fee and she offered to look into their reception and other problems.

The associate does note there are network problems in certain areas that need to be addressed. BUT the"issue" with reception at the stadium is one of sheer numbers. being that my town is on the smallish side there is not really the need to have a "large metropolitian" type cell network with a billizion towers as that would be very expensive for such a small number of "peak" time useage.


MY thought is this : HOW do you expect to get a decent cell signal with potentially 100,000 people (remember this is a smallish town to begin with) using their mobile devices before, during AND after the game.

The couple would NOT leave that issue alone.

The associate was able to placate the couple about looking into the other and/or phone nertwork problems.

[TheSHAD0W]

The only possible solution would be to put nanocells every fifty feet or so throughout the stadium. I'm not sure how well that'd work, though; it would depend on how low each phone's transmitter could adjust itself, and I'm not sure what the lower cutoff would be, as I don't think they're designed for such close usage. If the minimum transmission level is too high, there would still be too much interference.

It might be something your company would want to consider though. In a couple of years we may have 90% of the people going to view sporting events bringing their tablet device, reading the electronic stats for the event, getting specific camera views or whatever, and you'll need to handle that traffic. (Think about all the data contracts your company would be getting paid for, though.)

[Merriweather]

SC logic. "So there I was, in the middle of this gorgeous pristine section of desert, I'd hiked for days, our guide assured us that probably only a few dozen people ever get there during a year's time, it's that isolated. So untraveled, so untouched by man, it ws wonderful. And then, can you believe it, when I tried to call aunt Bessy to tell her where I was, I found my cell phone didn't have a connection!! How dare my cell company not have a tower out there so I can get cell reception? "

[PepperElf]

well technically they weren't asking for the ETF to be waved but to " YOUI HAVE REAALLY CRAPPY SERVICE I WANNNNNAAAA CANCEL NOW!!@!!!!"


the bitch inside me says, "fine. you're canceled. The final bill will be in the mail." and since the ETF is part of the contract, too bad so sad...