Vodafone call quality

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freitasm

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#111026 16-Feb-2008 20:47

exportgoldman: You think Vodafone would be able to run a network which had coverage in the CBD of the largest city in the country, but mine (and numerous reports of others here and elsewhere) prove otherwise.

Largest city in the country? Try getting some good HSDPA coverage in the capital's CBD...

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johnr

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#111027 16-Feb-2008 20:50

exportgoldman:
johnr:
Please find one mobile provider in the world that does not drop calls! you won't

Vodafone NZ has a very low drop call rate compared to other wireless carriers around the globe!

Dropped calls/call quality is monitered very close on the network!

Vodafone does like to know about dropped calls affecting customers espically in areas that never use to drop calls,

OK John, As I have been reporting to Vodafone for two years now, directly as directed by our account manager to the call centre, and on geekzone previously here are a list of places which drop calls. I have replaced my phone several times, and used different brands and models with the same results.

Parnell - Birdwood Cresent. Constant dropping of calls, bad coverage
Mt Wellington - Black spot, always drop calls on State Highway 1
Heading from City centre to Mission bay, black spots, allways dropping calls.
Harbour Bridge - Drop calls, or fade in and out of coverage going over the bridge.
Citybound before the newmarket flyover, 50% chance of dropping your call.

Now, once you fix those, I'll give you a list of places which just have bad coverage, or the call goes dead but stays connected with full signal. Look up my number 021301499 in your CSR application and you will see months and months of me reporting faults day in
day out with no resolutions for years afterwards.

Oh - let me guess, you'll now look into it, and never get back to me, and these will remain current ongoing problems with your network which have been logged for years and never resolved.

You think Vodafone would be able to run a network which had coverage in the CBD of the largest city in the country, but mine (and numerous reports of others here and elsewhere) prove otherwise.

The information provided by Vodafone/Telecom customers is used for future planning and as with wireless they all can't be resolved that easily without new hardware.

You will get blackspots as you have pointed out but that is wireless! As advised before every wireless provider in the world has black spots could be low coverage/dropped calls.

Going through sunset lights on the North shore heading south will drop a call, its one of those areas too.

In a perfect wireless world there would be %100 coverage and 0 dropped calls and phone batteries that don't go flat! but I can't see this ever happening!

paradoxsm

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#111033 16-Feb-2008 21:08

All those areas bar Mt Wellington are very difficult to fix for handovers from a technical perspective.. Pretty good compared to most places worldwide and especially good considering the nasty terrain.

As for the Mt Wellington blackspot, Both Telecom and Vodafone have terrible coverage there and I have never figured out why! as it's just plain ol suburbia.
FM Broadcast reception there is also very marginal.

exportgoldman

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#111052 17-Feb-2008 00:03

johnr:

The information provided by Vodafone/Telecom customers is used for future planning and as with wireless they all can't be resolved that easily without new hardware.

You will get blackspots as you have pointed out but that is wireless! As advised before every wireless provider in the world has black spots could be low coverage/dropped calls.

Going through sunset lights on the North shore heading south will drop a call, its one of those areas too.

In a perfect wireless world there would be %100 coverage and 0 dropped calls and phone batteries that don't go flat! but I can't see this ever happening!

So when you said "Vodafone does like to know about dropped calls affecting customers espically in areas that never use to drop calls,"

And then I supplied to you locations and details of black spots in the CBD of Auckland with details of faults logged up to three years ago, you now say Vodafone needs new hardware to fix, and hasn't budgeted, projected, or scheduled for this work to be done this in the three years since and now you say that only in a perfect would Vodafone would be able to fix these problems??

Sounds like a copout to me. If Vodafone did really do future planning, they would have fixed thes problems by now, they have been going on for a very long time (up to 4 years.)

How come I can't make and recieve calls in Parnell, but I'm within spitting distance of the main parnell shops, and can see the CBD skyline? I'm not in a valley either.

I'm not asking for 100% coverage and 0 dropped calls, what I'm asking for is that on the main highway through the biggest city in New Zealand that I can maintain a call, or I can report that I cannot, and it is fixed within 3-4 years of me repeatedly reporting it.

Or, failing that, I would like a truthful answer from you when I state this, instead of telling me Vodafone would like to know about this, but when I tell them, or you, a employee at Vodafone heres a whole bunch of bad coverage spots in highly trafficed locations, that you don't then whip out the 'in the perfect world' excuse. May as well say up front, we don't care. At least it doesn't waste everyones time.

So, this is my exact point, no matter where I try to report these blackspots, or how many times I report them, I always get the runaround and fob offs, and they never get fixed after repeated promises from Vodafone staff that they will. BUT THEY CONTINUE TO TAKE MY MONEY FROM THE DROPPED CALLS.

May as well be throwing my money down the drain, it would be just as effective as trying to make calls in these locations, and a lot less fustrating.

And now I find out all my calls now sound like I'm in a tin can because you are out of capacity in your network and halved all your call quality codecs... Can I have half my bill back please? (Actually don't go there, I'm still 6 months after the pit stop yet to recieve a correct invoice.)

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exportgoldman

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#111054 17-Feb-2008 00:08

paradoxsm: All those areas bar Mt Wellington are very difficult to fix for handovers from a technical perspective.. Pretty good compared to most places worldwide and especially good considering the nasty terrain.

As for the Mt Wellington blackspot, Both Telecom and Vodafone have terrible coverage there and I have never figured out why! as it's just plain ol suburbia.
FM Broadcast reception there is also very marginal.

I've tried to figure this out as well, heading north at Mt Wellington, on the slow right hand bend is where I always drop calls, if it's late at night I can speed through this 'dead spot' and hold the call if I'm lucky. I have yet to explain that one to a cop :-)

I don't know why calls drop here, or why they just don't mound a mini-cellsite on the huge poll which has the traffic camera on the left hand side on this corner, it would be perfect. (I'm not a mobile specialist, but I assume somewhere which is on the corner and mounted up high would fix this???)

I can understand the dropped calls as you go under the Greenlane overpass, but god knows why they have not put a booster under the offramp/roundabout.

I've never had FM problems in Mt Wellington too though?!?!?

Tyler - Parnell Geek - iPhone 3G - Lenovo X301 - Kaseya - Great Western Steak House, these are some of my favourite things.

richms

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#111065 17-Feb-2008 01:04

There are loads of places that calls are bad which vodafone choose to do nothing about.

The countdown in glenfield mall is one of them. The shops in highbury ($2 shop opposite the post office, the asb and all along there, all have low/no signal. I have lost calls when driving thru highbury, thru the bypass and missed calls when in the mall up there. the post office as well has crap signal in it, the mall seems a little better but nothing in the carpark frequently.

I gave up reporting deadspots a long time ago, they just dont care since its allways in building or in car that I lose calls. They say its because the phone is in my pocket or because its on a car seat or in the ashtray and not a carkit. Not when I am walking along the road with the phone out in my hand away from my body. The thing is, people normally keep the phone in their pocket, or in a bag with keys, or on a car seat, so these excuses are lame.

I have not had calls drop out going thru mt wellington. Where exactly do they drop? before or after tip top going south?

At least the signal gauge on my telecom cdma phone is honest, if there are bars, it will usually work, whereas the gsm will show signal but you try to call and just get the three beeps on the first few goes, and many times I pull it out of my pocket to see no network when I am places that there should be signal.

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johnr

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#111085 17-Feb-2008 08:13

Richms Highbury shops by the ASB has full 3G coverage

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#111154 17-Feb-2008 12:40

Thats great that there is 3g coverage there, but the issue in the thread is to do with the changes to gsm so the availability of 3g in those places isnt really here nor there.

The vodafone website says that they have a 2g gsm network. Its becoming clear that they are abandoning this network in favour of 3g. This has happened with no warning or compensation.

If they are not going to maintain their levels of 2g service, which lets face it is what most people have phones for (at least ones I know) then they should stop selling phones for it and give an upgrade path to people using 2g at the moment.

I dont know if the changes to the 2g are technological limitations with overloading of cells that had capacity before or political with them deciding to offload some space to NZC, but the answer that 3g works is less useful then that telecom cdma works in those locations, since it costs more to get a 3g phone then a cdma one from telecom. Its like having a ford mondeo that breaks down all the time and when you complain to them about it they tell you that a falcon works all the time.

Richard rich.ms

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#112669 24-Feb-2008 13:49

Been let down by GSM 3 times over the last week - first was when going to new plymouth - was running late and saw the phone had signal when I was in some small town (next along from awikino) so tried making a call - had 2 bars so not great, but didnt go thru.

Its not on vodafones coverage list so not suprising. my telecom phone worked fine even tho they also say no coverage there.

Second was driving along the southern motorway coming up to market road. Got the text to say that I missed a call. Was timestamped at that time, so it probarbly came thru when going over the newmarket viaduct. The phone was on the seat of the car which if you believe vodafone csrs means it will not work properly. I use 2talk callback to get a decent rate to call people, so I call my 028 number, let it ring once and hang up and it calls back and I put my pin in and then dial the number - pain in the butt but makes it affordable to use vs the prepay rates.

Anyway, called the number, nothing happens and then after ages I get the 3 beeps - when signal comes back I call again, rings once, hang up. It calls back and I answer and cannot hear a thing. I hang up since its a useless call, I call the callback again and it gets thru first go, hang up, it calls back and I answer and I can barely hear the voice, but I dial the pin and number anyway. Call was absolute rubbish with me barely being able to hear. This is with the phone handheld, not on the seat so there is no excuse for it being lousy.

And again when I was on the phone at home, call just dropped with no breakup or anything before hand, just the three beeps of a dropped call while the other person was talking.

Richard rich.ms

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#112673 24-Feb-2008 14:06

I had a call go terrible on friday but is was much worse thabn just GSM-HR. It was during the call to Vodafone CS to have OCCF removed, it's the first time it's glitched for me.
The last two nights in central Auckland however had proved no problems and coverage was top-notch in the city even in some of the basements we were setting up in

coffeebaron

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#112679 24-Feb-2008 14:15

Yep, have to add me to the list. Had two really bad calls to Telecom CDMA phones. I could hear them OK, but I was having to repeat myself plenty for them to make me out.

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#112806 24-Feb-2008 23:31

I've found with my Nokia E65 if I change the product code in it so I can load the latest Nokia firmware, it provides an option to set the phone to UMTS only, whereas the Vodafone firmware only lets you choose GSM Only or Dual Mode.

Since setting my phone to UMTS only, I actually haven't had any dropped calls or missed calls (i.e. not ringing), and I regularly travel between work on Symonds Street and Orewa, as well as Symonds Street to South Auckland, both times crossing the Harbour Bridge and the Newmarket Viaduct + Mount Wellington. The call quality is better too. I think half the problem with dual mode is the phone tries to change down to GSM to avoid losing your call when the signal gets weaker, but generally a new cell site isn't far away and so by the time the phone has switched the call, you're back in strong UMTS coverage anyway so the phone didn't actually need to switch.

Admittedly I'll need to enable GSM again when I'm outside of Auckland, but most of the time I'm not so it shouldn't be an issue.

alasta

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#112816 25-Feb-2008 06:54

richms: Been let down by GSM 3 times over the last week - first was when going to new plymouth - was running late and saw the phone had signal when I was in some small town (next along from awikino) so tried making a call - had 2 bars so not great, but didnt go thru.

South Taranaki is one area where Vodafone's coverage has always been terrible.

ninjabear

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#113126 26-Feb-2008 11:14

South Taranaki reception has been terrible for the past 4 years however at the end of last year I notice an increase of better reception.I get nearly full bar reception now in eltham

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