Originally Posted by
The Lord Lucan:
“Orange off peak i get this:
http://yfrog.com/17iphone3pics550p
During the day i get this:
http://yfrog.com/juiphone3pics567j”
OMG those ping times are horrendous, my pings are 143ms, yours are 3-4 seconds, that's shocking.
Originally Posted by The Lord Lucan:
“There is one thing about 3G coverage it changes all the time. The more people using that 3G mast a reduction in coverage will be seen... so called 2G doesn't work like that and the coverage stays the same no matter how many are on it.”
Sort of, this cell breathing thing has been misunderstood I think as I did some reading recently that suggests it doesn't effect coverage at all.
What should happen is your phone communicates with the cell you are on and tells it what signal in decibels it is getting from any cells it can see in the area. The cell and the controllers then decide which cell to put you on based on that data, it will prefer the one with the best signal, it is important to note that your phone does NOT decide that, it only sends the data to the cell and it's controller decides whether to move you or keep you on the current cell.
You should always try and stay on cells that you get the strongest signal from.
*load kicks in causing capacity issue*
When the cell you are on gets above a certain amount of utilisation it uses the data yours and other phones tell it about signal levels to decide who to kick off (by kick off I mean deliberately move you to a cell that is less congested).
So you may not be on the nearest because it's congested, but it knows you will still have signal because it knows you have an acceptable signal level on another cell thanks to the data you fed to it about the other cells you could see and the signal levels of them.
If you didn't have an acceptable signal level from any other cells it wouldn't kick you it would kick somebody else who did.
So I think this cell breathing has been misinterpreted, it should never cause coverage to change depending on capacity only
which cell you are connected to should change.
Of course if lots of cells are all severely congested you won't get a connection and you'll end up connecting to 2G, something which may happen on some *cough* networks who haven't invested much in 3G coverage / capacity.
If there are any network engineers here please feel free to correct me as I'm not a network engineer, but this was my understanding of it from doing a bit of online research.