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Comment by lsc | Hacker News Reader

>- Improve cellular reception. We are now heavily reliant on our cell phones, yet half the time our cell phones don't work because we are inside a building or not close to a tower and so on. This needs to be fixed ASAP.

Everyone wants to buy the cheapest cellphone plan, then they complain when it doesn't work in buildings. Your location matters here, but at least in the more enclosed bars in san jose, AT&T and T-mobile are super unreliable; Verizon works fine.

I mean, I understand, I also want things that are good and cheap. And when you can get it, that's great. But I don't think this one is apple's fault.

My biggest complaint about the reception on my own cell is that if I'm within range of a wifi network I've connected to in the past, but that network is broken at the router at this moment? My phone keeps trying to use wifi rather than connecting to my cellular network.

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> Everyone wants to buy the cheapest cellphone plan, then they complain when it doesn't work in buildings. Your location matters here, but at least in the more enclosed bars in san jose, AT&T and T-mobile are super unreliable; Verizon works fine.

In the UK we have one set of physical lines, owned and run by BT. BT has to, by law, lease the lines out to sub providers at it's own "internal" costing rate so that there is competition in telephone providers.

It remains bemusing to me that Mobile Towers weren't treated in the same way, with every provider using the same network of towers and sharing. We do it for emergency calls (999 will route the nearest/strongest tower irrespective of owner), and frankly you'd have fewer towers over-saturating the high population areas for the 4-5 networks.

Here in Norway we have two mobile networks (Telenor and Netcom). Telenor is the old state company like BT, that used to be called Televerket. They also own most of the physical lines like in the UK. Netcom is the only privately started company that acquired a license in the 90s.

When Telenor were privatised the license required them to sell capacity at cost to other operators. The same license requirements hold for mobile towers so all the small operators can piggyback on their infrastructure at cost. The result is that we have over 50 operators competing on services and add-ons while having approximately the same base network quality.

This is largely the case for ISPs too and it works great I think.

>The result is that we have over 50 operators competing on services and add-ons while having approximately the same base network quality.

what kind of services or add ons would you possibly want with a cellphone? most of the "features" they offer around here are things I'd pay money to not get. I mean, I guess tethering, but I personally am a little bit offended I have to pay extra for that rather than just paying for the data (I do pay extra for tethering, because if you want the good network, that's another fee you have to pay if you are being honest and don't want to spend a bunch of extra time sysadmining your phone)

> My phone keeps trying to use wifi rather than connecting to my cellular network.

This already exists and it's called "Wi-Fi Assist". It's disabled by default but you can enable it by scrolling all the way down in the "Mobile Data" settings menu (after all the apps).

Yup, I turn that on. It doesn't seem to help much at all, which seems weird; I mean, most network-level mitigations only help if the error is on the immediate link, so it's unsurprising that it doesn't help when my home router is down but my home wifi is still strong... but I get a similar problem at work; the wifi at work is setup to be strong in the building and to cut off almost immediately when you get outside (no, I'm not sure how it's implemented, but they did a good job) and the transition from wifi to cellular is just not very smooth; I'm out of contact for a good 30 seconds, a lot of the time. Not what I expect from a cellphone and plan of this expense in this age.

Both Android and iPhone have put lots of effort into the 'broken WiFi network" problem. Apple has done MPTCP (allowing data to be split over WiFi and mobile), and Google has led on captive portal detection and disconnecting from non-working WiFi networks.

Despite that, results both sides of the fence are lackluster. User experience wandering through a city with WiFi hotspots is still terrible.

I want to be able to start a video call on Skype and go for a jog through the city and have it dynamically switch from WiFi to 4g every few paces while not dropping any frames. We're far from that world.

To achieve my proposed connectivity, platforms would need:

* Ability to connect to multiple WiFi networks at once (already possible with firmware mods).

* A worldwide shift to MPTCP or QUIC to handle IP address changes without disrupting user traffic.

* A VPN/gateway to tunnel legacy traffic which isn't QUIC or MPTCP. Google already does this for Project Fi

* Preferably the ability to subscribe to multiple phone networks/cells at once to avoid the few hundred millisecond gap in data connectivity when switching cells. Mediatek devices can already do this with firmware mods.

Facebook is launching their own satellites to beam down high-speed internet. (See https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/21/17598418/facebook-athena-... ) Why isn't Apple doing that? More than anyone else Apple needs it.

People have been talking about LEO internet for as long as I've been working; It didn't work in the '90s, mostly due to launch costs

(you see, for decent network performance, the satellites need to be low - that means you need a lot of satellites, because each one can't be seen from much of the earth's surface, and because they are so low, there is enough atmospheric drag that you have to replace the things every few years. If you use satellites at a regular orbit, you use fewer of them, sure, but you also then have the problem of really looong ping times.)

I mean, I'm sure someone will eventually get it, but we probably need to lower launch costs, and we need to do a lot of engineering on the rest of it. It's not an easy problem.

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