<p>I was just wondering about the cell phone coverage and reception around the caltech campus and generally in Pasadena. How are the major companies like verizon, cingular, t-mobile, and sprint and how do they compare? Any help is much appreciated! Thanks :)</p>
<p>I don't know what the problem is (too many buildings with too much cement? o.O), but I think just about everybody's reception is relatively poor. I have a smart phone that I use specifically because it has better reception than my old flip phone. On the smart phone, I get anywhere from zero to two (if I'm lucky, three) bars out of five from Verizon in my north house room. There are a few areas on campus (e.g., between Thomas and Guggenheim) that are dead zones, and other areas where I can regularly expect to get two to four bars. I'd say it's a pretty common phenomenon to see people running out of buildings to answer a phone call.</p>
<p>Pasadena has pretty good reception from Verizon in general, though. I don't recall ever having a problem with reception in Pasadena outside of Tech... I think four or five bars is pretty normal.</p>
<p>Verizon and t-mobile I think are the general consensus. I have t-mobile myself.</p>
<p>I used my cell phone (Cingular) all around campus at pre-frosh weekend. There were a few spots where reception was poor, and obviously not in any of the north houses (didn't try in the mods). But other than a few spots, it worked pretty well.</p>
<p>Anyone have Sprint?</p>
<p>I made a few calls from within my room at prefrosh with my sprint phone and didn't notice any reception trouble at all.</p>
<p>Verizon supposedly has a tower on top of Millikan Library. T-Mobile and Cingular share a lot of towers in LA, so it doesn't matter which one of the two you have, you'll be using the same infrastructure. Personally, I have a T-Mobile phone and the only place I wasn't able to get full signal was my room in the old South Houses, which because of the wire mesh in the plaster walls are essentially Faraday cages. It got a little spotty there. There was a sweet spot about the size of a basketball next to my desk that gave 5 out of 6 bars, but everywhere else in the room was between 0 and 2 bars. si1verdrake's phone, on one of the CDMA networks, worked normally in the same building.</p>
<p>I forgot to mention, I got two to four bars from Verizon in the mods. Not too shabby.</p>
<p>I'm no EE but some of you maybe. Could you install an antenna (cell phone sized/tuned) on the roof, a coax down to the inside of the bldg hallway attached to another antenna, thereby bypassing the metal lathe grid?</p>
<p>cell phone then broadcasts to the antenna in the hall then out to the tower through the roof to the cell tower? </p>
<p>What are the issues here and how do you make it work, simply and cheaply?</p>
<p>Does any operator in the US use any of the GSM 900/1800 standards?</p>
<p>Clightgofast, they do have those things- they're sold as "cell phone range extenders", and cost around $200 apiece. The problem is that the cement/plaster in the walls will kill the signal, even if you are broadcasting it inside the building, so you won't really gain a whole lot.</p>
<p>MIT_Dreamer, the reason the US has different GSM frequencies is that the normal ones were already full when GSM was introduced. However, most recent GSM phones support both US and global frequencies.</p>
<p>I was thinking more of a total hovse or campus wide type solution. Don’t really know what the real problem with the signal is. Massive walls, maybe have some impact. The metal grid in the plaster/concrete is it grounded? Can it be ungrounded? Or maybe tuned to work as an antenna for good not evil. Is part of the signal problem really one of tower location? Lots of questions. It just seems wrong to pay soooo much for cell service and not get quality at one of the techy-est places on earth.</p>
<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faraday_cage%5B/url%5D">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faraday_cage</a></p>
<p>I would figure that the metal grid is large enough to act as a ground itself. I get decent reception outside of buildings. I don't think it's a tower problem.</p>
<p>We already looked at it, back when I was a frosh and we had delusions of using it for a WiFi antenna. The mesh is grounded. Probably a water pipe running through it. If you want 100% perfect reception inside the South Houses, get one of the Nokia UMA phones that can switch from GSM to VoIP over WiFi without dropping the call.</p>