Suggestions for increasing your mobile signal strength

Here are a few other suggestions to aid you in enhancing your signal strength:

• Keep the “line of sight” rule in mind – often, the higher you are able to be within a building or the nearer to a window you are located, the better signal you will achieve. Although “line of sight” isn’t literally meant as being able to see the nearest tower, the most direct line you can provide between your device and where the signal originates will heighten your service.
• Certain building types or reinforced areas of buildings will have no viable way – at this point in technology’s advance – to provide reliable mobile service. Instead of fighting with your phone or your service provider, walk away. When a colleague who worked in the radiology lab within a building would complain that his phone never received signal while at work, I would gently remind him that the same reinforcements designed to keep radiology from leaking out of his area also worked to block any airborne signals from entering his area. The easiest solution in this case was to advise him to walk outside – a mere 20-second trip – when he needed to make a call. As for incoming phone calls, I would encourage utilizing call-forwarding options available with your service provider to bounce phone calls from your mobile device to your landline phone when you absolutely cannot afford to miss an important phone call and do not want to experience call dropping when involved in critical teleconferences. Most service providers provide this option at a “per call forwarded” price, plus any long distance charges. If you only experience a few incoming phone calls per day, this may be a cost-effective option. If your phone never stops ringing, it can get expensive – but the benefit of the call being able to reach your desk can far outweigh the relative cost.
• If you are driving from point A to point B, anticipate that you will drop off your conference call at least once. It’s inevitable – even through routes that you know cold and that you’ve never experienced a drops call during before will have problems occasionally. Cellular towers are being constructed at approximately the same rate as Starbucks – I keep expecting to see a flyer in my mail advertising one of each in my walk-in closet before month’s end – but unlike the concrete and brick design of your average coffee shop, towers can be delicate and are subject to wind, rain, sunspots and even vandalism. Translation: even if you had coverage through a certain location last night on the way home from work, it can be a dead spot today. I make a majority of my daily phone calls when driving in my car, and constantly joke with my friends and colleagues that much like the rain cloud that followed Charlie Brown in the Peanuts cartoons, I have a dead spot that follows my car. Often, the calls I engage in are not of critical importance, so if I drop a call, my life moves on. But if I know that I have to join an important call while out and about in my car, I pull of the road when I’m in a location that has fantastic signal strength. While those areas might change from day to day, it’s unlikely they’ll change while I’m sitting there.
• Finally, make sure your service provider is compatible with the area you spend a majority of your time in. As much as I hated to do it, I changed service providers when I moved out of state, because while my old provider was the talk of the town back home, they couldn’t compete in my new area. With my old organization, we eventually pulled about half of our users from our primary service provider and put them on new plans with a new provider, which cleared up many issues in the flip of a flip phone.