Behodar:

 

My Spark phone dropped to 3G while I was in the Whakatane CBD a couple of nights ago (specifically inside Cobb & Co if anyone's that interested). I know RF's a black art but you'd think that L700 would penetrate buildings better than U850.

 

Spark doesn't even have working mobile service in their own Hornby retail store, with the rest of the mall has either 1 bar or no service - despite that the store is more-or-less facing towards their tower. One NZ has this sorted with their own equipment in the mall, I believe.

With Spark in Hornby more generally, their 5G is tuned so incredibly poorly that the UE will continue hold on to it with sub-10 Mbps downloads but the upload is so slow (well belong 1 Mbps) as to be functionally unusable. The service might as well be 3G because I have to turn 5G off every time I travel into the area, which is often.

This happens on multiple phones and I've spoken with other people in the community who faced the same issue, so I went in to speak with the store staff recently - they said that Spark knows about this, yet doesn't appear to be doing anything to fix it. I've been facing the issue since at least August last year when I first signed up and have logged a fault yet seen no discernible improvements. This same issue happens in a number of areas in Christchurch. Oddly, I've not seen it happen anywhere else in the country.

FWIW there is no 3500 MHz in Hornby.