Ask HN: Hypothesis: Cellular providers are deprioritizing voice calls?
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This was a pattern across more than a year, spanning multiple devices (all iphones). It happens on both wifi and cellular. It happens with wifi calling enabled and disabled. It happens with people I call every day, in my address book, as well as new contacts (say someone I met who called to follow up). I called support, searched online, reset network settings multiple times at different points months apart.
After being on T-Mobile for about a year, the degraded service is about the same as Verizon. Every week, more than once, people call me, my phone never rings, and I never see a missed call on my device. It happens at home, at work, on work trips in different states.
I still get missed calls regularly and my device shows I missed the call. It seems like a certain % of callers get my VM, but I never know the call attempt happened. The missed calls never appear later on my phone (like a late VM or text deliver, coming minutes or sometimes hours after it was sent).
Hypothesis: A growing number of cellular subscribers don't care enough or use voice calls as much, so (regardless of motive/feelings) cellular providers have found they can simply reduce quality without losing customers.
Discussion (29 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
This makes absolutely zero sense because calls take negligible bandwidth, especially with VoLTE. Not to mention the whole premise isn't even internally consistent. "People don't use it enough, so let's try to save money by making them use it even less! But only randomly and at the margins, so we still have to keep everything running!"
I doubt QCI levels are affected by this. I think Call handshakes are QCI 5 and the calls themselves are QCI 1 but im not an expert.
Have you tried disabling 5G and dropping back down to 4G? I heard that the transition from VoLTE to VoNR might still be sketchy and not fully solidified. Just turn off data altogether and see for a while to see if that improves things.
Maybe porting your primary number to a cloud PBX service like Google Voice or some business oriented service? When someone calls your number, the carrier-to-carrier SIP handshake happens on Google's redundant enterprise servers instead of targeting your sleeping iPhone. Google's servers instantly answer the routing request, hopefully preventing a timeout. GV then forwards the call to your iPhone's GV app using a standard data push notification, hopefully waking the phone reliably?
Just throwing ideas out. If you've tried these already, apologies for the redundancy.
Because nobody calls anymore. If anything calling is considered rude compared to texting, to the extent that some text first before calling.
>Others could better comment on this but I think landlines were leagues better in latency and sound quality.
landline latency (near instant, if you're both on the same CO) is basically impossible to achieve with a digital system, because of all the buffers and packets involved.
I've noted similar in the three main networks, where I've suspected the load balancing algorithm for traffic adjusts a setting in regard to cut off on signal strength hasn't been quite set right. Obviously at times dealing with extraordinary use at the time, one expects balancing. One network in my locale a few years ago, it was quite clear it was either over subscribed, techs made a mistake adjusting the algorithms ... or just too many people trying to use that particular one tower, and three people in the same spot could often note the three different states the network could be in, none, unavailable, signal - this existed for many months. The balancing has been tuned up a few times since then. I have found when the network's coverage was spotty for voice calls, one could generally use data to get online albeit as slow rates.
Recently the main network I'm using (Optus,) I've noted missed calls that went to voice mail, I have not heard the call at all. I have been blaming signal though I don't have it on me (sits outside the window up high) to ensure the phone has good signal. However on data over wifi, the network often drops out for a minute or more at times.
Even so, in a scenario where I have missed a call due to spotty service, the expected behavior once I have service again is I see the missed call on my device. That's the aggravating part of this issue: I never know someone tried to call me.
So I don't know. I believe that you're experiencing what you're experiencing, but I'm not sure the cause is what you're thinking it is, because it would be weird for carriers to only deprioritize incoming calls for some subscribers (like you) and not others (like me).
But maybe it's also the case that the cell towers in my area aren't starved for capacity, but they are where you live?
But it's possible that your cellular provider has misconfigured STIR/SHAKEN validation and/or some badly behaving spam call detection.
On the spam topic though, it is, or was, a common tactic for some spammers to do just enough on the call initialization front to generate a missed call or similar without actually ringing a device, leave no VM, the goal being to prompt you to return the call. Though this doesn't fit with the time delay aspect.
One significant reason is roaming and inter-provider calls. Internal calls can go through a fully IP-native network, but external calls often need SS7 singalling and arcane interconnects. And you really don't want your SS7 switches to be even pingable from the public network.
BTW, one thing to check: misbehaving WiFi calling. It works by establishing an IPSec connection with the ISP's infrastructure for that hidden IP. It should not be possible on a cellular connection (because what's the point?), but given the decline in technical expertise, I'd also disable it to see if it helps.
It makes sense on dual sim phones, eg. sim 1 is connected to cell network, but sim2 doesn't have signal or is roaming.
https://preview.redd.it/9c70t7iluksd1.jpeg?width=1080&format...
https://www.reddit.com/r/Visible/comments/1fvbpun/wifi_calli...