phones, network connections, and debugging

[cellio]

[Update to the update, 2020-12-14 13:15 EST: Lost service again this morning. After much discussion with a T-Mobile rep, I've learned that they are doing work on my tower to upgrade it for 5G, this work will continue for a few weeks, and while they don't think there are general outages despite my reports, "brief interruptions" are possible during this work. Uh...]

[Update 2020-12-13 15:45 EST: Problem went away on its own; see comment below for more info.]

I generally don't keep my phone's WiFi on; even though I could use my home network, I don't tend to run into throttling on the cell network, this frees up some home bandwidth for other things (like my work computer, since March), and I'd rather not have other WiFi networks passively tracking me when I'm out and about (not a consideration since March, but someday again I hope).

On Thursday my phone started dropping the cell connection -- flaky, not outright reporting errors, but almost entirely not working. (In timing that somehow just fits in 2020, it dropped two minutes before an important phone call.) I've switched to WiFi, which seems to demand more battery, but eh, it's a workaround.

This, however, leaves me with the underlying problem: what the heck is going on? I've already power-cycled, reseated the SIM card, reset the network connections (but not messed around in APN), toggled into and out of airplane mode... none of that helped. I even got a new SIM card from T-Mobile (on Friday) and swapped that in; still nothing. Another device on the same network (and plan) gets low bars but gets bars. This feels like a recent degradation, but in the course of debugging this I learned that Dani uses the home WiFi all the time, so I don't have good data from a second device.

I talked with an actual human at T-Mobile (in order to get the new SIM card), who told me that he's not surprised that a phone released in 2016 (I bought in in 2017) is having problems on "modern networks" (by which we mean the 4G LTE that's been there for the life of this phone). His take is that technology moves on and my phone's antenna probably isn't powerful enough any more. I don't know how to test that hypothesis; if the antenna were completely gone it wouldn't work with WiFi either, but it does.

Is there some other debugging I can do, or any simple repair I can make? Or am I in "buy a new phone" territory?

A new phone wouldn't necessarily be the worst thing; mine is stuck at Android 7.1.1 (because of US trade blocks against China that happened mere weeks after I bought the phone). But the phone otherwise works fine, so if it's fixable then replacing it would be a waste. And, more significantly: WTF is with phone sizes and aspect ratios these days? My phone has a 16:9 aspect ratio and is 6" long. This is a good size for me. Anything bigger won't comfortably fit in my pocket; much smaller and I'll have trouble seeing. And that's where the width comes in: modern phones are too freaking skinny for text! They've all been designed around the idea that you'll watch widescreen movies on your phone, I guess, which I consider ridiculous -- I'll watch movies on my TV or at least my full-size monitor, or if really pressed, my 10" tablet. Not my phone. But to make them support that, they've made the portrait orientation tall and skinny, and that does not work for me.

Remember when cell phones were new and not yet smart? (Some of you might not.) There were two basic styles: flip-phones and candy bars. I never understood why anybody liked the candy bars; they were large and prone to butt-dialing. A flip-phone fit in my pocket fine and its keys couldn't accidentally be pressed while closed. While locking has presumably cut down on butt-dialing, I still don't want the candy-bar form factor.

(My phone is a ZTE Axon 7. I would like as close to its aspect ratio and size as I can get, if I have to get a new one.)

--

A tip led me to Network Cell Info Lite, which has gauges with needles that hover between the orange and red zones (not completely static). I'll collect some more data points when getting take-out tomorrow.

Comments

[minoanmiss]

I thought I was the only person who liked flip phones! I am extra delighted that one of the most tech savvy people I know does!

[madfilkentist]

That claim by the T-Mobile representative sound like bull aimed at making you get a new phone. It's far too soon for them to abandon 4G in favor of 5G. You've got a definite date, so if they made any changes to the towers near you on that date, they should have a record. If they don't, the claim makes no sense.

I'm reminded of the time that I was having trouble with my Fairpoint DSL connection. I made repeated calls to try to get it fixed. At one point I was told it was because they divide my bandwidth into fixed slices for each device which is connected, so that if I have four devices and three of them are doing nothing, the computer I'm using will get only a quarter of the bandwidth. That would have been an utterly stupid way to design a modem, and it turned out to be nonsense; eventually a tech discovered a wiring problem in my house.

[hudebnik]

"if the antenna were completely gone it wouldn't work with WiFi either, but it does"

I'm not sure this is valid reasoning. Cell-phone service and WiFi each use several frequency bands, but I think in general WiFi uses higher frequencies than cell-phone (which makes sense, since it's intended for short range), so you might have two physically distinct antennae.

Let's see... Google "cell phone frequencies"... T-Mobile uses several bands, "1900MHz, 1700/2100MHz 700, 600" [I don't know what the "700, 600" at the end is]

Likewise, the two principal bands used for wifi are 2.4GHz and 5GHz. So the lower-frequency wifi band is slightly above the highest-frequency cell phone band. It's not an enormous difference, but enough that the manufacturer might plausibly have put in two antennae.