Archived from groups: alt.cellular.sprintpcs (More info?)

Many times when I am using Vision the signal will go from four bars to zero
bars and then back to four bars. This causes a pause when surfing websites.
Note that I am stationary and that the phone is also held very stationary.
This seems to happen with all Sprint Phones when using Vision. It does not
occur when using the phone for voice communication. What causes this
phenomena? Are there any CDMA Gurus out there?

-mij

Archived from groups: alt.cellular.sprintpcs (More info?)

See my post from June 8.

>From http://tinyurl.com/bemg5:

"Now, with GSM, the signal strength indicator is exactly that, a signal
strength meter. So, the more bars you have, the stronger the signal you
get from the tower is. You can rely on this to evaluate the signal
penetration in a given building.

For CDMA though, it's different. The system is designed so that you can
always add another phone on the tower, "talking" and "listening" on the
frequency, but in the process adding "noise" to all other phones. So
signal strength is not really important. The signal strength on CDMA
cell phones indicates the signal to noise ratio (SNR), in other words,
the signal quality. That means that you can stand in one spot for say,
one hour, and see the indicator on your phone fluctuate between 0 and 4
bars constantly. The quality of the signal depends on how much signal
is getting in the building, but also how many phones are in your
vicinity. The more phones are present, the worse the signal is."

Archived from groups: alt.cellular.sprintpcs (More info?)

One negative thing with CDMA is that your phone will often cycle
through a number of different PN offsets looking for the best available
signal. But the problem is the phone can't always tell which is the
best. So what's likely to happen is your phone will often lock on to a
PN offset that might have a weaker signal or more noise on it even
though a better PN offset is available with less noise. They need to
develop a better improved CDMA system so that the phone becomes smarter
about which tower sector it favors or feeds off of and also taking more
into consideration the noise level of the tower sector (PN offset).