I’ve been using Bell since prior to moving here. Everywhere I ask suggest that have the best “coverage”. They even have 3 towers near my location. but neither my roommate or I can get a decent signal in our condo. I often miss calls or experience disconnects.
This is also true when out doing errands such as buying groceries. I usually send pictures to my roommate to confirm what I need to buy. But often need find specific places in the stores that have signal.
Does anyone else have this issue? also is there any provider which doesn’t have this issue?
Solution
There was a wifi calling option on my phone. I was confused by the websites which made it sound like somthing that cost extra. Turns out you just need to provide an adress for 911 use then it just sorta works.
I don’t live in TO so I can’t answer regarding which provider is best. In Montreal, I’m with Fido (runs on Roger’s network) and it works decently in grocery stores but it can of course be spotty but this is particularly in very busy areas like Costco. I work on telecommunications engineering so I’ll give some insight on the problem and a half-solution for your condo:
Cell waves have a hard time with concrete, so there often isn’t really much you can do about this if your condo is made of that.
One pricy solution is to get a cell extender which involves having an antenna outdoors wiring it to an access point indoors which relays the signals back and forth. This is a very pricey solution though and can have its own issues.
My best solution: use online messaging and calling services (e.g., Signal, Whatsapp, FB Messenger). This assumes your WiFi connection is good though. I feel like in this day most people have data plans so you can communicate almost exclusively with these, just a question of getting people to contact you there instead. But this of course doesn’t help with lack of reception in grocery stores or the like, just for places where you might have WiFi connection and not cell reception.
I have the same situation in Edmonton. Concrete builing, and my ‘office’ is an internal room with no windows. The solution was to get a carrier that had a VoWIFI service. Telus has one but it’s custom and only works with certain phones IIRC, so I ended up going with Virgin. All I needed to do was register my account for it (free), and now I never miss a call/SMS when I’m not near an external window.
There’s too many services that still rely on SMS (password OTP, food delivery, etc) to live without it.
Rogers/Fido’s network coverage is good, Telus/chatr I think works fine.
Public is also Telus
If Bell has poor coverage in your place so will Telus and Rogers is unlikely to be better. Look into WiFi Calling availability on Bell. I’m with Freedom who have historically had bad service indoors and I’m successfully mitigating that via their WiFi Calling feature.
