verizon woes
the only mobile phone carrier i've ever been a part of is verizon. i think i'm going on ten-ish years as a verizon customer.
pretty much the entire time i've been with them i've never had any issues with calls or texts or receptions; on average i think a call would drop once every three months or slightly less. granted, i don't use the phone *too* often, but i do have regular long-distancers that i call at least once a week for anywhere between a half hour to an hour and a half. only rarely would i have an issue where reception was non-existent, where people would try to call me and it would hit straight to voicemail.
starting a few weeks ago this changed. mark calls and texts me on a regular basis, and suddenly there's been an unusually high percentage of times when he would try to call me or text me and i wouldn't receive anything. my phone registers full bars during this, but something isn't going through. I can -send- things fine, and usually when that happens, that will trigger something in the network and then i'll get 4 rapid texts in a row from mark that he tried to send about 5-15 minutes before.
my theory is that it's because of the iPhone. i don't know how many people made the switch over, but i'm betting that Verizon is finding under-the-cover ways to compensate for the fact that their network hasn't yet been able to fully deal with the sudden increase in network usage. the network is still more reliable than AT&T, but the difference between the two is that when the AT&T network drops signal on my phone, it tells me straight up that it's happening. I reboot my AT&T iPhone about three to four times a day so that it can re-recognize the network. Verizon's seeming under-the-cover tactic makes it seem like there's nothing wrong with my phone or the network at all, and then a half-hour later mark is calling me on my other phone saying, "wtf mate?"
i'm not *positive* that this is happening, but it seems pretty likely. out of curiosity and as a personal check, i've started a google calendar event that's going to send my phone a text message every two hours from the hours of 10:00 and 00:00 to see how often (if ever) the text gets dropped unless i trigger a network event on my end of the phone. I was thinking of doing it every hour, but that seems a little overkill. i might do it if none of the texts get dropped just to see what happens, and if nothing seems wrong, i'll probably blame T-mobile's relationship with Verizon.