Questions for people with non-landline phones.

[Jeff7]

- When someone calls you on a cellphone, does your phone ring? Or vibrate? Or give at least some revolutionary indication that someone is calling?
- VOIP: Can people call you and have it....work?


I just missed a meetup with someone so that I could make some adjustments to some equipment they bought. The miss was the result of a combination of reasons, including multiple traffic problems getting across town, and a closed road.
But, my phone didn't ring when he called to let me know that someone would still be available to unlock the breaker room. (Three times he had called.) The phone didn't say that I had missed any calls, nor did it say that any had even occurred at any time today. And I had good 3G reception.
Then, somewhere around 12 minutes after the last call had been placed, it finally buzzed to say that I had voicemails.
This is a Tracfone. In years prior, I've used AT&T and Virgin Mobile, also pay-as-you-go plans. I had the same issue with all of them: The phone would wait anywhere from 10 minutes to 2 days to tell me that I had missed a call or that I had voicemail, despite having good reception.


VOIP: I've got Skype, and a Skype number. Most of the time it doesn't even ring. It's the same as with the cellphones - it'll tell me that I have a voice message well after the call was placed. (Note that it won't tell me that a call was missed, nor does it seem to know that one had even occurred.) Skype will at least tell me I have a voice message waiting as soon as it's been placed, though it too will sometimes wait quite a few hours before displaying a notification.
Besides that, people seem to have trouble calling me. Their service gives some notification that the number can't be reached, or is not available. But if I try calling my Skype number from my crappy cellphone, it works perfectly, every time.


Is this just par for the course with non-landline phone services?

I can say that my experience with receiving calls from cellphones, while being on a commercial landline myself at the time, is that the quality is poor, and that about 10-15% of the calls will drop at some point if they last much more than 5 minutes.
Since I'm not paying >$50/month for cell service, does that automatically send me down to the darkest, murkiest depths of tiered service?



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[clamum]

I doesn't happen too often, but occasionally I will get the same thing: Someone will call and leave a voicemail, and it'll take up to a couple hours to see that I in fact have a voicemail. Usually it works as it should though. I have Straight Talk and a Samsung Galaxy Proclaim, FWIW.

 

[zerocool84]

Get a better cellphone service provider for your area if you're constantly having dropped calls. Difference networks have different call quality in different areas.

Tracphone is likely your problem.

 

[Atomic Playboy]

- When someone calls you on a cellphone, does your phone ring? Or vibrate? Or give at least some indication that someone is calling?

Are you actually asking whether people have cellphones that have the magical capability of announcing incoming phone calls as they happen or are you just sarcastically dismissing your TracFone for being unable to accomplish one of the key tasks that makes something a phone?

 

[Jeff7]

Are you actually asking whether people have cellphones that have the magical capability of announcing incoming phone calls as they happen or are you just sarcastically dismissing your TracFone for being unable to accomplish one of the key tasks that makes something a phone?

This.


Well, the TracFone.....and also the AT&T GoPhone, and the VirginMobile Nokia phone.

So with my track record, such capability would be nearly magical.



(Post edited, to at least hint at a little sarcasm. )

 

[Ravynmagi]

I use the Obi 110 with Google Voice as my home VoIP. And it's worked as well as any landline I've had. Been very happy with it and other than the $50 cost of the box, it's been completely free.

 

[Tom]

If you think about it, receiving a call relies on the network being able to find your phone at the precise moment the call occurs.

When you make a call your phone contacts the network, and it doesn't have to happen at the moment you make the call..which is a an easier thing to accomplish.

One solution is to use Google voice as your inbox and have it send you an email that you got a call. That doesn't require that your phone be available at any given instant.

 

[notposting]

Never had this problem in 8 or 9 years with Verizon. And voicemail indication is nearly instant.

 

[ViRGE]

Since I'm not paying >$50/month for cell service, does that automatically send me down to the darkest, murkiest depths of tiered service?

Yes. MVNOs get access to fewer towers and operate on a lower priority on those towers. When push comes to shove, post-paid customers of the network operator have first priority.

Now admittedly what happened to you is a rather extreme example. Most people never have an issue and I have to suspect that reception was at least one of the factors. But using an MVNO certainly wasn't doing you any favors.

 

[Thegonagle]

Verizon is the most reliable for voice calls. I've used them all, and even Verizon has occasional hiccups, but my phone failing to ring when someone calls me is exceedingly rare on Verizon (that's happened only a few times since 2001) and delayed voicemail notifications has never happened as far as I can remember.

Sprint/Virgin? I use a Virgin Pay-Lo burner to make most of my work-related calls. Given all the times I hit send and nothing happens for 15-20 seconds or the phone just gives up and tells me the network is unavailable, I'm sure if I used that line for incoming calls, I'd have missed a few without knowing it. Also, apparently still notorious for the delayed voicemail notification, just like they were in 1999.

T-Mobile? Used them as my work burner off and on for years, and as my personal phone for 5 months. They're better with call reliability than Sprint in my experience, but they're still not up to par with Verizon. On the plus side, I haven't had a delayed voicemail notification that I can remember, so if a caller gets dumped to voicemail without ringing your phone, you'll probably know right away as long as they leave a message.

AT&T? (I've also used TracFone with an AT&T SIM as a burner.) AT&T was usually fine, but... In June of 2012, a huge concert at our new MLB stadium brought down their network hard. I wasn't using the TracFone that day, but I was trying to contact an AT&T customer who lived two blocks from the stadium. His iPhone had become a brick. No incoming calls, no outgoing calls, no data, no texting. He wasn't happy.

I keep hearing "oh, AT&T is fine now," but I'm not so sure. I mean, I didn't have any problem using my Verizon phone near the stadium during that concert. That was just last year. Verizon seems to build to peak requirements, like 60,000 country music fans in a downtown stadium. AT&T clearly hadn't.

 

[desura]

Speaking of which...

I"m thinking of switching from sprint to maybe a MVNO on the ATT or Verizon network.

I don't use the phone that much as it is, so ideally I'd have a setup where like I get the phone, buy like $50 worth of credit that pretty much lasts forever, and use it only when I need to.

 

[Thegonagle]

Your two major choices for that kind of usage are T-Mobile prepaid on the Pay As You Go plan, or TracFone. The details on how each works vary slightly, and $50 that "lasts forever" isn't going to happen, but you generally can buy service for up to a year in advance for about $100+tax. (Works out to a little less than $9 a month.)

You can get TracFones that use AT&T, T-Mobile, or Verizon, but whether they want to sell you the Verizon (CDMA) version depends on where you live. They really would rather have you on AT&T or T-Mobile for your home network because they make more profit off those lines.

Once, I drove over 100 miles to a rural area, in another state, to find a Wal-Mart that stocked a TracFone that homes on the Verizon network. I brought it home and had no trouble activating it in my home area with a local area code. It was a long drive though.

 

[desura]

Your two major choices for that kind of usage are T-Mobile prepaid on the Pay As You Go plan, or TracFone. The details on how each works vary slightly, and $50 that "lasts forever" isn't going to happen, but you generally can buy service for up to a year in advance for about $100+tax. (Works out to a little less than $9 a month.)

You can get TracFones that use AT&T, T-Mobile, or Verizon, but whether they want to sell you the Verizon (CDMA) version depends on where you live. They really would rather have you on AT&T or T-Mobile for your home network because they make more profit off those lines.

Once, I drove over 100 miles to a rural area, in another state, to find a Wal-Mart that stocked a TracFone that homes on the Verizon network. I brought it home and had no trouble activating it in my home area with a local area code. It was a long drive though.

I recently found h2o phone might give me what I need. Basically, they allow you to activate even a smartphone on the prepaid plans. Like, there's one that's $100 for 2000 minutes that lasts a year, and data is $0.10 a MB. So I could activate like an iphone on it, disable cellular data, and be set. In emergency situations, I could just activate cellular data.

Can you do anything similar on Tracfone?

 

[Tom]

Pageplus has 2000 minutes for $80 a year and they use Verizon towers. I've read that iphone 4 or 4s will work but I don't have personal experience.