Over the last several months I’ve had conversations with a half dozen people who tell me they believe that cellular network quality is deteriorating. The evidence they have been using is an increase in dropped calls, the occasional ability to not get a ring tone , and a decrease in voice quality during calls. I know these observations are subjective, and if I only heard this from one or two people I wouldn’t be writing this blog. But I have to also include myself in the list of those who have noticed a change.
This happened once before. It was very clear before the big carriers introduced the 5G spectrum upgrades that the 4G network was getting badly overloaded. I can remember being on calls where I could barely hear people at the other end. I remember having dropped calls several times per week.
But the network problems went away within a relatively short period of time after the introduction of 5G spectrum that also coincided with some general upgrades to the overall cellular networks. This makes a lot of sense, because the introduction of the new spectrum means that carriers were able to spread existing traffic over two networks instead of just one. Anybody using the 5G network after they were introduced got great service at first because the networks were relatively empty. 4G networks also improved as the traffic decreased.
Call quality also got noticeably better. We can’t know exactly what improved voice quality. It could have been from spreading voice calls across two networks. It also might have been due to new voice technologies. For example, the major carriers implanted Voice over LTE (VoLTE) which introduced techniques to improve the quality of audio signals. This technology is automatic for phones that are certified by the carriers to use the technology.
There are several reasons why cellular calling might be deteriorating. First is the overall continued increase in cellular data traffic that puts more stress on cell sites every year. I’ve not been able to find specific statistics for the overall increase in cellular traffic volumes nationwide, but I’ve seen folks who have speculated that it’s north of 20% per year. You don’t have to be a network engineer to do enough simple math to see that compounded 20% growth can put major stress on all components of a network after only three or four years. It was this growth of traffic that drove the carriers to rush implementation of 5G networks. There were markets before the 5G upgrades that were getting close to collapsing.
Another reason that quality might be deteriorating is that carriers decided not to implement small cells in the way they were promising five years ago. They claimed there would be a small cell site in every neighborhood by now, and the reality is that the vast majority of the small cells never got built. Carriers looked at the capital cost and decided it was too expensive except in the most densely populated places.
The final reason might be FWA cellular broadband. The big cell carriers have added over 7 million broadband customers to cell sites. This is mostly home broadband, and ISPs all understand how the broadband demand from households has continued to grow. According to OpenVault, the average home in 2019 used 218 gigabytes of data per month, and that ballooned by 561 gigabytes in 2023. Cell sites were not designed to provide the steady streaming used for home broadband uses like connecting to schools and offices, gaming, and non-stop video streaming.
The carriers acknowledge that FWA traffic can impair normal cellular traffic and the FWA product comes with the warning that the carriers might throttle traffic any time that cell traffic gets too heavy. But now that the carriers have added million of customers to FWA, I have to wonder how willing they are to cut FWA broadband speeds? All the ISPs I know tell me that the public has grown exceedingly intolerant of slowdown or lapses in broadband, and I have to wonder how many homes will keep FWA if they get throttled too often. Deterioration of cellular performance might be due to a reluctance to throttle FWA broadband customers.
All of this is conjecture and based upon purely subjective evidence from folks I know. But these are all industry folks who are good at noticing this sort of thing, and I have more problems with cell calls than I did a year ago. I speculate that cellular network deterioration would be local problem and not global, so it might matter where you live. I’m curious about the experience of readers.
They completely missed fixing bufferbloat (already bad on regular service) on the way to FWA. The packet captures of 5G are terrible to behold, spending 30% or more of the data transfers in retransmits alone. More should be taking packet captures. The problems would become obvious to all.
Hi Doug, thanks for speaking to this. I am in Massachusetts and do not use a cellphone but have VOIP and the call quality and dropped calls are increasing. 99% of the time I am talking to someone who is on a cell phone and they often hear my voice cutting in and out….and I believe that some other type of pulsed transmission (electric meter? water meter?) is interfering with the call. At times I dial a number and have to wait for over a minute or more of dead air before the call connects. Please continue to investigate.
I would prefer to maintain a POTS land line but the cost is unreasonable, and I believe that the statistics about the demand for landlines are misleading. As ATT attempts to sunset its landline service in CA., juxtaposed with the network outage, I hope that this issue of cellular, broadband, IOT, etc. gets more thoughtful attention, not for a more powerful network but for more than one, – overlapping, for safety, health, and reliability. Thanks for all you do.
As bad as I hate to say, there will come a day when regulatory-demarcations will need to be established for all cellular-based carriers, who provide FWA across a shared network. Long-term, all ‘data-traffic’ across cellular should inherently have a lower priority than voice traffic, especially emergency traffic. There’s wisdom in this moving forward, as cellular has now become a critical component for emergency communications, commerce & a plethora of other sound reasons. If carriers are allowed to continue down this path, an already oversubscribed network sharing streaming content, FWA, this is a recipe for catastrophic failure. Best engineering practice is to be planning way ahead, looking at trends & patterns in the industry demands, rather than all being dictated by EBITDA.
Long-term, wireless will likely be forced into specific defined sectors of services. We all know any RF has massive limitations, considering population density, long-term demands & growth considered. Demarcating broadband services would define ‘lanes’ to work within & optimize, rather than sitting back & watching all these companies racing for federal funding to build out poorly thought out or planned networks ahead of significantly more robust terrestrial-based solutions.
Bottom-line: do what your best at, as best as possible.
Thanks for raising this issue. As the retired President of Microsoft Canada testified to the NH legislature, wireless is no longer advanced technology. It’s outlived its useful life. For primary connectivity, we should be talking to our towns and legislatures about transitioning to future-proof fiber-optics or high speed cable to and through the premises. The speeds are much faster, signal is more reliable, data and privacy are better protected, and wired connections consume 10x less energy than the energy-hog wireless infrastructure. Plus, when electricity goes out, fiber connections remain. See Mr. Clegg’s testimony, other countries are far ahead of us: https://alpaca-chinchilla-x6xf.squarespace.com/s/Clegg-Comments-to-New-Hampshire-Science-Technology-and-Energy-Committee-7-Feb-2022.pdf.
You and your readers are welcome to learn more at Massachusetts for Safe Technology, https://www.ma4safetech.org/.
Respectfully,
Cece Doucette, Director
The move to 5G in our area, which is rural, caused an immediate drop in call quality. It went from bad to beyond terrible. Calling while not on WiFi is simply an exercise in frustration. I was just on a call 10 minutes ago that dropped twice in 5 minutes. I’m 1.5 miles from a Verizon tower. I would suggest that happens on 50% of calls at least. A number of the Verizon towers in our area are uplinked to other ones because they don’t have fiber. This is right along the I-5 interstate. I’m pretty certain the fibered towers only have 1Gbps but can’t prove that. I ran dual sim for 3 months TMO and Verizon. There is no one carrier that has coverage enough in our county. And this area is dead flat, not mountains or even hills. It’s utterly pathetic.
Dear Doug:
Thank you for the poignant article. For many of us, our experience with cellular is recent… or our experience goes back to the 1990s. Cellular carriers have always sought out the biggest clients in all their endeavors, whether voice, data or other applications. No doubt, the carriers are probably showing preference to the big data applications, which makes good business sense… and not worrying as much about their voice callers. No one will probably admit to this.
I remember dropping calls near my home so often — and entering the drop into the tracking system — that the carrier built a tower nearby (or at least I hoped I was the impetus!).
Generally, in the WDC area, I do not experience dropped calls very much any more. Last weekend I was in eastern West Virginia, and one call almost-dropped twice.
Many moons ago (c. mid-1990s), I was a sales rep for a cellular carrier in WDC and dropped calls were a prevalent issue then as well. Portable/hand-held phones were starting to show up (… remember the Motorola “brick” phones?) and installed car phones were all the rage, and customers kept returning to me with dropped-call horror stories. I would tell them that a cell phone is more like radio than a home phone — “If you can’t listen to a radio at your office cubicle (or wherever), you can’t get a good cellphone signal.”
On the other hand, there were many times I was in my car talking to clients (not moving, by the way!), and with the clarity, they couldn’t believe I was on a cell phone. It all depended on the wattage (… carphones had more than portables) and your proximity to the nearest cell site tower.
Also in the 1990s, some cell phones functioned more like walkie talkies and with a niche in construction industry job site communications.
I believe that was the “Nextel” cell phone…
Off the top of my head, that network was coddled together by a former FCC guy who foresaw the viability of turning walkie-talkies into a competing cell phone network.
If memory serves me they got swallowed up by Sprint and T-Mobile…
Yeah, Nextel was fantastic. I realize the market share would be small but if you are involved in the AG industry at all you will find to this day there are people that would pay a premium to have Nextel back. It absolutely made life easier like no other communication system has, before or after. Cell phone + two way radio rolled into one with the ability for group talk. I worked in AG for the first 16 years of my life before starting an ISP. We kicked and screamed when Nextel went away but obviously that wasn’t going to change anything. Tried a few smart phone apps here and there like voxer etc but eventually gave up, it all worked like garbage compared to Nextel. Went back to using cellular for phone calls and dedicated 2-way radios for unit to unit communication. To this day I still get a couple questions a year from farmers, now that I’m in tech, if something like Nextel could ever come back. That functionality was taken away from their industry and has not been replaced by anything yet.