I have a Captivate on AT&T in NYC. I had an iPhone before that. With the iphone i had crappy service in the form of dropped calls and delays in receiving and sending texts, and very slow data speeds.
With the captivate i have problems with sound quality, but no dropped calls. ATT has admitted to me after several calls both when I had the iphone and with the Captivate, that there are cell tower issues in the area where I live. Also have found message boads specific to my neighborhood (within a couple clocks of me actually), where people reported the exact same quality issues, and heard the same thing from ATT. This has been going on at least since February of this year. I previously thought the problem was specific to iphones on theor network for whatever reason, but that's not true; their network just sucks (can't handle the load, whatever).
the most recent time this happened was today, and they said there were issues with broken towers in Manhattan and so a lot of traffic was being routed through only three towers.
Anyways, my point is, i'm thinking of creating a service that would keep track of cell service in different areas geographically. The service would basically be an app on a mobile device, and would perform quality tests for data/voice, and then upload it to the cloud along with info about the carrier, GPS coordinates, and the phone. Then aggregate data would be available for the public to browse, so you can see exactly what kind of coverage you might get in your hood if you are considering AT&T.
The problems I see with this are that mainly only a limited crowd of geeks would use this, so i might not be able to collect much data, unless i found a compelling reason for more mainstream users to use it.
What are your thoughts on this? Be aware if you provide any ideas in this thread and the small chance I end up making this, you consent me to use your ideas without any obligation to compensate you.
With the captivate i have problems with sound quality, but no dropped calls. ATT has admitted to me after several calls both when I had the iphone and with the Captivate, that there are cell tower issues in the area where I live. Also have found message boads specific to my neighborhood (within a couple clocks of me actually), where people reported the exact same quality issues, and heard the same thing from ATT. This has been going on at least since February of this year. I previously thought the problem was specific to iphones on theor network for whatever reason, but that's not true; their network just sucks (can't handle the load, whatever).
the most recent time this happened was today, and they said there were issues with broken towers in Manhattan and so a lot of traffic was being routed through only three towers.
Anyways, my point is, i'm thinking of creating a service that would keep track of cell service in different areas geographically. The service would basically be an app on a mobile device, and would perform quality tests for data/voice, and then upload it to the cloud along with info about the carrier, GPS coordinates, and the phone. Then aggregate data would be available for the public to browse, so you can see exactly what kind of coverage you might get in your hood if you are considering AT&T.
The problems I see with this are that mainly only a limited crowd of geeks would use this, so i might not be able to collect much data, unless i found a compelling reason for more mainstream users to use it.
What are your thoughts on this? Be aware if you provide any ideas in this thread and the small chance I end up making this, you consent me to use your ideas without any obligation to compensate you.
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