alt Hacker NewsInteresting. Another detail I should add: in virtually all of the cases where I have the silent missed calls, I have full or adequate service, and can otherwise use my phone. Internet browsing, apps, and as mentioned even wifi calling via whatsapp etc.. works fine.
Even so, in a scenario where I have missed a call due to spotty service, the expected behavior once I have service again is I see the missed call on my device. That's the aggravating part of this issue: I never know someone tried to call me.
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Yeah phone working, sit by it, and realise when checking the phone, for reasons unknown there's a recent missed call - that is the worst, especially if it's important and you've been waiting on a reply for a few days for them to have the time to call back. Often I wonder if the person only rang for a second or less, not long enough for the network to ring the phone but at times I get a voice mail ... so maybe not.
BTW, I don't so much mean a spotty network, just spotty voice calls over the network, where it seems there's not enough signal to carry the voice - apparently - but yet still capable for data over a hotspot delivering 100 to 300 kB/s minimum depending on factors like weather or time of day. From what I understand voice data is compressed via voice specific codecs. Most don't use more than 64 kB/s. [1] [2] [3] I think the silent calls are intermittent and by the time I've realised it would be probably pointless to test, however much of the time I could not say if the phone's browser was loading slow or fast as I rarely use any of the phone's functions apart from calls, plain sms texts, occasion to rare use of browser with preloaded tabs and creating a hotspot.
Likewise though not quite the same, over the past years I've had networks where the phone might ring but it is not situated well enough for the signal to be able to carry out any sort of conversation - and yet via a hotspot, downloading near to 1 MB/s without skipping a beat.
I still get some automated phone systems that are apparently not happy with the amount of voice data they are receiving even though what I hear is quite clear, and at times, have from near same time and spot, just rung other people who have not reported any difficulties hearing me. I've eventually learned to just hang up once the menu system goes awry and try a few hours later.
[1] https://www.gl.com/voice-codecs.html (has the codecs with a breakdown below the table)
[2] https://mobilepacketcore.com/glossary/codecs-audio-and-video... (brief overview including media streams )
[3] https://phoneguides.org/voice-codecs/ (Iffy coded site, refused older firefox, janky with a fairly recent chrome based browser)
Exact same thing happens to me, all the time. Verizon user on a traditional post-paid plan, with an iPhone 15 Pro Max, in the Los Angeles area.
My phone will show as having full service, usually it displays as “LTE” in the top bar while at home whether or not I’m connected to WiFi, as soon as I step outside of my building and head 25 feet in any direction 5G or 5GUW seems to take over.
It’s strange, I’ve always gotten missed calls over the many years I’ve been with Verizon (over 20) and I’m not entirely sure exactly when I noticed that people were increasingly telling me they called me, while I had zero idea or any way of knowing whatsoever. At best, I’d get lucky and they were one of the rare people still leaving voicemails these days, and an alert might show up for that at some random point.
It got bad enough that after trying everything else, I even went and picked up one of those “network extender” boxes the carriers have from a Verizon retail store, out of a sense of desperation hoping it might help solve the issue, although I knew beforehand that almost surely it would not. Which was the case, of course.
I wish I could say I had any idea as to what is actually causing this but all my attempts to pin down the root cause have proven to be a waste of time. A very frustrating waste of time. Worst of all is that as far as I can tell, it isn’t an issue that’s isolated to any single carrier, subcarrier, phone model, physical location, and so on. While there do appear to be some patterns here and there, it’s largely random and I don’t know if certain carriers have this issue worse than others but Verizon is frequently one mentioned. Whether or not that’s due to their popularity, my noticing it more because I use Verizon as well, or because it’s worse with them, who knows? Maybe someone reading this, lol.