Forum Discussion
Experiencing Dropped Calls
Every phone call is like a seance -- "Can you hear me? Hello? Hello? Anyone there?"
Why the hell am I paying so much money for cell service when I'd be as well throwing a message in a bottle in the...
So, I think we've established that Telus has garbage service.
They've replaced all contact options with useless chatbots ... great for the shareholders, lay off the staff.
Meanwhile, I can't make or receive a **bleep** phone call. All for the great low low price of $150 a month. Fantastic.
Does anyone have any suggestions for other cell services in BC? This is totally useless.
Honestly, for what Telus is charging you ($150/month), a satellite phone almost seems worth it. At least you know it’ll work anywhere.
In my city, Telus has most of their 5G towers concentrated downtown. The problem is, the higher-frequency 5G bands (like 3500 MHz) don’t travel far and barely penetrate buildings. Even though Telus’s map says I have 5G, I’m on the fringe of coverage and it’s completely unreliable indoors.
My building is concrete with stucco over wire mesh (old-school style), which acts like a Faraday cage. I recently found out that modern glass — especially Low-E or double-pane — also reflects signals because of metallic coatings. So between concrete, mesh, and glass, signal indoors is garbage.
Telus still uses 5G NSA (Non-Standalone), which means calls actually go through LTE (VoLTE), not 5G directly. But since we only have two LTE towers covering my city, LTE fallback is spotty and overloaded (You might be having the same problem). So since phones are always sending data... My voice calls are still using the LTE data network and regular data is on 5G. But when 5G Data drops out (all the time for me) and tries to also fall back to the LTE band, the handoff is crappy and can interrupt the voice service. If you are in a poor 5G coverage area this is constantly happening so...
Another issue is how poorly networks handle switching between 5G and LTE. If the phone tries to jump back to LTE during a call, it often disconnects mid-call or fails to connect at all.
So yeah, the Telus map might say “full 5G coverage,” but in the real world, it’s not built out enough yet to actually be reliable. 😞
