The following is some of my experiences using a Nokia 6160i phone with the Rogers AT&T Digital service in Vancouver BC. It was originally a message to the reps at Rogers, to which I did receive a reply, which you will see at the end. It's a lot of reading, but I tried to be as unbiased as possible, and you should find this interesting.
I have removed most of the specific names, because I have not asked them if they wish their names associated with the views published here.
Wed 8/30/2000 12:28 am - Ryan's day one review:
Voice Quality
About 10 minutes after the meeting with the AT&T reps, I called customer service
(*611) to have the outgoing caller-id enabled on the phones so we could use the
feature productively. I could not believe that out of 6 attempts, the call was
dropped while on hold 3 times, and got a fast-busy signal the other 3. The seventh
time I managed to get through. (This was around 6 pm)
There is a degradation in call quality while driving. Especially noticeable is the hand-off from tower to tower, while it happens the voice is garbled for 1-2 seconds, requiring you to ask the person on the other end to repeat themselves. There is also a noticeable amount of 'crackle noise' in the background at times.
I was talking to a buddy this evening and got him to sample the voice quality of each phone without telling him which phone was what. I called him on the AT&T Nokia, my Telus StarTAC, and then the ClearNET i1000. He rated the AT&T the worst, ClearNET second, and Telus first. The voice quality on the AT&T phones sounded the most compressed and flat (tinny), and the most digitized.
Otherwise, their service area seems 'excellent' so far, but I have only been in Burnaby without much travelling today. Calls while stationary are fine.
The Phone
Personally, I dislike the model of phone. Vibrate is not included, which I would
miss dearly.. I used a ring-only phone and a ring-only pager long enough to know
how much it annoys me, people in public, and clients :) The Nokia 6188 has a design
where you hold it at an angle into your ear, and away from your head below - I
don't like the feel of it, but that could just be me. There is no way to easily
switch from Digital to Analog, it seems this feature is unavailable. (Easily done
with Telus).
The voicemail system is exactly the same system as Telus, and it works as expected, aside from the fact that Telus voicemail can be dialed with the password, where AT&T the password as DTMF tones once the call is established.
Text Paging
While setting up the text-page site for the phones today, I was surprised that
it took over 20 minutes for a page to get through to Jason and myself. After that,
the messages were coming through in about 2-10 minutes. Keep in mind the reps
warned us that they don't push it as the most reliable service, stating sometimes
messages take over 4 hours to get through. With Telus and ClearNet, these were
always instantaneous with the odd exception.
Data Services
All I could think about when the reps said they would invite us to become beta
testers of their upcoming data services was "we are going back in time".
We left Telus as they introduced circuit switched data services. ClearNet has
circuit switched data services, and now AT&T is going to 'beta test' data
services in Q4 2000.
Thu 9/14/2000 7:36 pm - After A Week
First, some points about the phone itself: (Nokia 6160i)
- No audio or visual feedback when a call drops - just silence, and a blank
screen - one is unsure if the call has dropped
- Can't manually switch to analog when you know digital service is poor, and the
phone won't give up digital.
The following are some observations I have made while using the phone in various locations I have been in over the past two weeks.
August 30 - While at a residence at British Properties in West Van, specifically on Westhill Close, calls were low quality. After 10 minutes into a call, the phone finally dropped to analog mode, but there was a lot of interference and I could barely hear the other person. For the record, ClearNet and Telus also had a weak signal there.
Wed. Sep 6 - Every call received or sent while in 4th floor - 999 Canada Place would go quiet during the call unless I held the phone in discreet positions. The call would eventually drop. ClearNet mike was also unusable here, but with my Telus StarTAC I could place the call and hold it without issue. I was disappointed that the AT&T phone would not drop to analog here.
Tuesday Sep 12 - 11:30am Many call attempts at Georgia and Thurlow open street would consistently only use analog.
Tuesday Sep 12 - mid afternoon Driving East on 1st ave near commercial, digital call dropped, call unintelligible for 20 seconds beforehand
Wednesday Sep 13 - Calls at 999 W. Hastings, 15th floor were incomprehensible to both parties. ClearNet mike has problems here as well, but my Telus StarTAC worked fine.
Thursday Sep 14 - 475 W. Georgia 2nd floor: 30 min period between 4:45 and 5:15 pm out of 10 calls, 8 of them would only use Analog. 2 of them upshifted to digital after a few minutes. This can be somewhat annoying when I want to discuss sensitive information.
I am a little bewildered why in my own experience with the Rogers AT&T service the phone will so easily give up the digital signal for analog when the signal seems strong enough to support it, and why in weak signal areas it won't drop to analog when I could most use it. Is that a possible sign that there is no digital channels available due to call volume in the area, and vice versa?
The voice quality leaves a little to be desired compared to newer codecs employed by CDMA handsets (Purevoice, EVRC), but overall, the service is acceptable, especially compared to Clearnet MiKE.
The concerns I note here are somewhat minor, as I have found quirks with other mobile services, but your comments would be appreciated.
Mon 9/18/2000 10:54 pm - Echo Problem
I have another issue that I wanted to bring up that I experienced on Friday, and once before a week or so ago.
I have heard about other people complaining about it in reference to Rogers AT&T service, but I experienced it myself, three times in a row - horrendous echo of my own voice. Both days I was driving East on 1st ave approximately between renfew and rupert, and it seems more likely on calls to residential phone lines.
Everything I would say would be echoed at full voice volume about 250ms later, which makes it REALLY hard to talk to say the least! ;-) I have never had this on Clearnet or Telus. If anything, I hear a little echo for the first few seconds while the network 'learns' the echo cancellation, but this just didn't work.
This happened from both incoming and outgoing calls.
Later while actually at the location of the number I called from the road, I called the phone from the land line and did not experience the same echo. Also, I did not get the echo when called from this number while downtown. (That call started analog, and upshifted to digital 30 seconds in).
Tue 9/26/00 7:27 AM - The reply from Rogers AT&T
Ryan,
Here are some preliminary answers to your queries we will still be scheduling a debriefing session, I am just waiting to here back from Connie on a good time, this week. One of our network support analysts will be joining us as well to answer further specific questions.
--
In response to Ryan's comments about echo, we currently have congestion on echo cancelling devices on our vanaxe1 switch which serves Vancouver, Van Island, North Van. There are to be more echo cancelling devices added today or tomorrow to fix this problem. As for analog calls downtown, we do have some digital congestion downtown, digital channel adds are ongoing. As for poor quality digital calls not going to analog, this is a software function called IFAP (improved fringe area performance) a feature that we typically use in rural areas, not downtown Van. In Van we want people on digital. As for poor Rogers calls and good Telus calls at 999 W. Hastings, Telus has a site on the roof of this building we don't. Hope this helps.
So, there you have it.
Ryan Goolevitch - ryang@trideja.com
Last Modified
August 22, 2001