Poor signal strength in 01746
DougMA
Newbie

I just moved near Railroad St in Holliston, MA (01746), and the signal outside for the entire week has been either one bar of 3G or one bar of 1x, and inside it's even worse. My iPhone 6 can only ever receive texts reliably when I'm connected to my home WiFi.  I also have to start my GPS apps while I'm connected to WiFi because it can never connect to get route info when it's on cell data only.

I was able to get LTE out by Lake Winthrop, but that's it.

I just ran a speedtest from my iPhone using the Speedtest app and got 59ms ping, 0.58Mbps download and 0.04Mbps upload.

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Re: Poor signal strength in 01746
smith6612
Community Leader
Community Leader

Does https://opensignal.com/ jive with what you're seeing?

Capture.jpg

There are a lot of towers owned by AT&T and Sprint in that area. Verizon tends to co-locate their equipment on such towers. Depending on how strong your signal was, it's possible that Verizon is on a Sprint tower found near Lake Winthrop.

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Re: Poor signal strength in 01746
DougMA
Newbie

Thanks for the website, I didn't know about it.  I'll start adding reports to it soon.


There aren't many reports around my area, but the ones nearby seem to indicate the same issues.  A few scattered very weak 4G reports, and a bunch of weak 3G reports, even though the Verizon tower for the area is in the center of town about .3 miles away.

I just wish Verizon's own coverage map that shows solid red 'you're area is covered with 4G' was true.

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Re: Poor signal strength in 01746
DougMA
Newbie

I walked from my house towards where the Verizon tower is listed on OpenSignal and used the OpenSignal speedtest every few houses.

From my house to three blocks away from the tower, it stayed on 3G and never got over .46Mbps download.  Once I was two blocks away it finally found LTE and I got 1.02Mbps, then one block away I got 5Mbps.  Right next to where the tower is listed (I couldn't see it), I got 22Mbps!

I started walking away from it, and one block away it dropped to 10Mbps, then another block to 5Mbps, then another to one Mbps.  Then my phone held onto one bar of LTE around 1MBs until I got to my house and the phone kept bouncing between LTE and 1X and the signal was so poor OpenSIgnal kept hanging up at the ping.  Putting it into airplane mode, waiting a minute, turning airplane mode off, it still bounced between the two.  I had to go into settings and disable LTE for it to pick up a 3G signal, and then it was the same under 1Mbps.

This is an older town, where the blocks are pretty small (maybe two or three houses on each block), and about one (sometimes two) tall older trees at each house.  When the signal dropped so much at such a short distance from the tower within the first two blocks, where it was still line of sight to the roof of the building with no trees in the way there, I'm guessing maybe the tower isn't powerful enough for the area.

Maybe someone from Verizon can chime in once everyone gets back to work tomorrow.

I'll keep walking around with this app to get more data, including to the other towers not owned by Verizon.

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Re: Poor signal strength in 01746
smith6612
Community Leader
Community Leader

Thanks for the information. Good to confirm where the tower is.

So that we know - when you have an LTE connection, please go to your phone app and dial *3001#12345#* and then press Call. This should bring up an engineering screen. From there, select "Serving Cell Info." The next time you get a chance to go for a walk, please let us know what LTE Band is in use at your home, and what is seen at the tower. You should see Band 2 and/or Band 4 in front of the tower, and at your home you should see Band 13.

What sort of trees are we dealing with? Pine trees absolutely mess up the LTE reception due to the needles. Also, how tall is the tower? I saw that one of the locations AT&T was on happened to be a water station. It didn't look to be very tall.

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Re: Poor signal strength in 01746
DigitalRules
Specialist - Level 1

Verizon may very well have decent coverage there. The iPhone 6 is not one of the better models for reception, so can't really knock Verizon till you see if anyone else is having issues there.

If so, you may need to look for a new provider. I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for a new tower unless one happens to already be under construction.

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