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Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

Why am I still reading about bad reception in San Francisco? I've been hearing about this for years. Why hasn't it been fixed? Is there some technical problem?

Genuinely curious. (Not interested in conspiracy theories or guesses, though. I can come up with those on my own.)

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The last I heard, there is a lot of red-tape dealing with permitting and placement. Plus, the geography of SF requires a lot of cell locations.

not sure how closely (or if at all) related this article is, but you might find it interesting:

"Culprit in [San Francisco] Wi-Fi Failures: Chicken Wire" http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126221116097210861.html

Thanks for that link. I don't know if it is "the answer", but it sure was an interesting link!

One interesting data point:

I popped over to SF for a week, taking with me my UK 3g iPhone. At no time did I have less than stellar reception from AT&T. I travelled from SF to San Jose or so, it seemed pretty solid to me.

Is the US version of the iPhone different hardware? :/ Maybe it's only crappy if you have a contract with AT&T? Maybe 'roaming' phones are given priority? idk...

Did you go into the Mission? Or Hayes Valley? Or over by Jtown? And god help you if there is any sort of Event nearby. During the maker faire every iphone read "5 bars" but no one could get their iPhones to do anything. Oh sure, it said it was sending texts and trying to make calls, it said it was trying to load webpages, but it all failed.

We Are Not Making This Up; and it's not just iPhone customers.

Yeah good point, I mainly use my phone for SMS/data rather than voice calls. So I probably don't have enough data there. I probably only had 3 or 4 voice calls. All of them were fine though.

Also I was at Google I/O, so there were probably 10,000+ phones all trying to get signals etc

And you're right, perhaps I'm assuming that my phone showing 5 bars actually means it has a strong enough signal to do stuff (Which is certainly the case in the UK) :/

The whole communications industry in the US seems like it needs a massive shake up from government to me.

Data is just as bad as voice in these regions. I don't now why people think it'd be much better.

Also did you make calls on your phone much? In the mission my phone shows good signal but on Saturday literally every call dropped. 15 dropped calls in a day.

Do you know if T-Mobile is any better in the mission?

T-Mobile is fine in the mission in my experience.

These issues are very SF specific so travel between South City and San Jose don't count.

I live in SF proper and get dropped calls in my house..

Are you sure your roaming provider was AT&T? (I suppose there's a chance that for voice and edge data, your UK carrier partners with TMobile rather than AT&T.)

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