alt Hacker NewsAsk HN: Hypothesis: Cellular providers are deprioritizing voice calls?
I switched from Verizon to T-Mobile, specifically because there were too many silent missed calls. Silent meaning my device never showed I had a missed call.
This was a pattern across more than a year, spanning multiple devices (all iphones). It happens on both wifi and cellular. It happens with wifi calling enabled and disabled. It happens with people I call every day, in my address book, as well as new contacts (say someone I met who called to follow up). I called support, searched online, reset network settings multiple times at different points months apart.
After being on T-Mobile for about a year, the degraded service is about the same as Verizon. Every week, more than once, people call me, my phone never rings, and I never see a missed call on my device. It happens at home, at work, on work trips in different states.
I still get missed calls regularly and my device shows I missed the call. It seems like a certain % of callers get my VM, but I never know the call attempt happened. The missed calls never appear later on my phone (like a late VM or text deliver, coming minutes or sometimes hours after it was sent).
Hypothesis: A growing number of cellular subscribers don't care enough or use voice calls as much, so (regardless of motive/feelings) cellular providers have found they can simply reduce quality without losing customers.
Comments
They should remove unlimited voice calls and make everyone using the phone network pay by the minute. It would eliminate robodialing instantly.
Oh man, did I go through this hell with a lot of MVNOs like two years ago. Pushed me to buy T-Mobile's most expensive plan. Something I actually regret to this day now, because I'm not sure if I got any real tangible benefit from it compared to all the money that went down the drain. However, now that I think about it, I don't feel like I've been getting too many ghost calls as I used to. It's hard for me to measure because in the last two years, I've been getting less overall calls as more of my colleagues transition to just texting.
I doubt QCI levels are affected by this. I think Call handshakes are QCI 5 and the calls themselves are QCI 1 but im not an expert.
Have you tried disabling 5G and dropping back down to 4G? I heard that the transition from VoLTE to VoNR might still be sketchy and not fully solidified. Just turn off data altogether and see for a while to see if that improves things.
Maybe porting your primary number to a cloud PBX service like Google Voice or some business oriented service? When someone calls your number, the carrier-to-carrier SIP handshake happens on Google's redundant enterprise servers instead of targeting your sleeping iPhone. Google's servers instantly answer the routing request, hopefully preventing a timeout. GV then forwards the call to your iPhone's GV app using a standard data push notification, hopefully waking the phone reliably?
Just throwing ideas out. If you've tried these already, apologies for the redundancy.
When is the last time a flagship phone release promoted its qualities as a telephone, like call fidelity? Others could better comment on this but I think landlines were leagues better in latency and sound quality. Kinda integral pieces to the experience of talking to someone.
I totally agree. Driving on the autobahn and calling someone gets worse and worse. They are decreasing the number of people having a call at once. The Quality with Signal/WhatsApp Audio seems better than cellular.
I've noticed a number of modem issues. I don't think this is actually related to network behavior. Pixels specifically when roaming up until the 9 had severe issues typically after 24 hours with full disconnects. The majority of users don't roam, and when they do they blame the network, but I'm becoming more inclined to believe this is an end-device issue.
Locally Verizon coverage has regressed over the past few years and I’m beginning to think about switching to T-Mobile myself. Verizon used to be the king of rural coverage but they’ve increasingly been usurped by T-Mobile who are putting equipment on rural towers at an increased rate.
Settings > Apps > Phone > Screen Unknown Callers > Never
Huh, I haven't seen anything like this. I've been on T-Mobile forever. I don't make many voice calls (maybe one or two per week, at most), but I receive a decent amount. I haven't noticed situations where I'll notice a call came in only because it went to voicemail without ringing.
So I don't know. I believe that you're experiencing what you're experiencing, but I'm not sure the cause is what you're thinking it is, because it would be weird for carriers to only deprioritize incoming calls for some subscribers (like you) and not others (like me).
But maybe it's also the case that the cell towers in my area aren't starved for capacity, but they are where you live?
Are you sure you don't have any misbehaving spam detectors? The voice circuits are VERY robust, low bandwidth, and cellular providers prioritize voice calls. There's just no reason to purposefully throttle the voice calls, the bandwidth savings would be negligible.
But it's possible that your cellular provider has misconfigured STIR/SHAKEN validation and/or some badly behaving spam call detection.
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>Hypothesis: A growing number of cellular subscribers don't care enough or use voice calls as much, so (regardless of motive/feelings) cellular providers have found they can simply reduce quality without losing customers.
This makes absolutely zero sense because calls take negligible bandwidth, especially with VoLTE. Not to mention the whole premise isn't even internally consistent. "People don't use it enough, so let's try to save money by making them use it even less! But only randomly and at the margins, so we still have to keep everything running!"