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Voice-over-LTE: The Reason Why Your Phone May Soon Stop Working

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Re: Voice-over-LTE: The Reason Why Your Phone May Soon Stop Working

#31

Post by foobarian »

gst wrote: post #14
timschmidt wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Installing a version of Android without Google Play Services running constantly in the background effectively doubles handset battery life in my experience. Disabling radios can do that again if the device is rarely used.

Slightly offtopic but related: One of my mobile providers supports configuring public (non firewalled) IP addresses for mobile devices and when choosing that option my phone battery drains very significantly faster than otherwise. I suspect it's because all the random packets that arrive every second or so on the public interface (when NAT and firewall are disabled) either cause the radio to use a lot more battery or…

That reminds me of when I had a computer with spinning rust hard drives on my desk in grad school. At some point I was trying to focus but there was a periodic, roughly once a second hard drive noise that was driving me nuts. Went through the usual suspects at the time like the background locatedb updater, and eventually ended up finding that some bot was trying to ssh login once per second going down a list of passwords, and the errors were being logged to disk. Need I mention the computer had a public IP address?

Re: Voice-over-LTE: The Reason Why Your Phone May Soon Stop Working

#32

Post by dehrmann »

beretguy wrote: post #8

My main concern with these higher frequency connections is that they require a lot more power to run. So we can’t have phones that will last weeks without charging.

lxgr explained why this isn't really the case on the radio side. What you're actually experiencing is you went from using a phone that had no backlit screen, no apps, no OTA app updates, no push notifications, no AI-enhanced photos, and a toy CPU to a full-fledged computer in your pocket.

Re: Voice-over-LTE: The Reason Why Your Phone May Soon Stop Working

#33

Post by gnicholas »

lxgr wrote: post #23
gnicholas wrote: post #20

One change I noticed from LTE to VoLTE is that the line now goes silent when the coverage gets spotty. Before, you would hear bits and pieces. The benefit to that was that even if you were talking you could hear little bits coming through (including silence) and you would know that the other person probably couldn't hear you well. Now you just hear nothing, and have no idea.

> even if you were talking you could hear little bits coming through (including silence) Do you mean comfort noise by any chance? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comfort_noise I don't see why that strategy wouldn't work for VoLTE, but I don't doubt that some implementations might not have bothered.

I don't know if it was natural or artificial. I just remember turning of VoLTE after the rollout first happened, since I preferred the old way. Now there is better coverage where I live, so it's less of an issue.

Re: Voice-over-LTE: The Reason Why Your Phone May Soon Stop Working

#34

Post by lacrimacida »

tass wrote: post #28
fwmcbumcrumble wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't fall back to the actual 2g connection. You're supposed to fall back to 2g speeds aka 128kbps or 256kbps. You'll still be connected to LTE towers, just at painfully slow speeds.

Correct, it just feels like it’s not working because almost nothing is designed to function at such slow speeds (HN is one of the good ones though!)

There’s a hidden advantage: you use the phone a lot less when outside. It’s enough for email, chat and a slow map. Could feel both annoying and a blessing at the same time

Re: Voice-over-LTE: The Reason Why Your Phone May Soon Stop Working

#35

Post by vel0city »

beretguy wrote: post #8

My main concern with these higher frequency connections is that they require a lot more power to run. So we can’t have phones that will last weeks without charging.

Battery usage and frequency have practically no correlation. I've got HF gear (things running at just a few MHz) that use car batteries to run a few hours. I've got 2.4GHz stuff designed to run off practically a watch battery and for their use case last weeks.

And either way phones running on 4G LTE or 5G are largely using the same frequencies as before. Few phones actually connect to those ultra wideband networks for any notable percentage of the time. Most of the time they're connecting to 4G/5G towers operating around the same older GSM bands. Those earlier StarTAC phones and the Nokia 5110 ran at ~800-1900MHz. A modern 5G phone on T-Mobile US (Band n71) will operate on 600MHz. On your logic, a modern 5G phone on T-Mobile should work much longer than many older phones.

Re: Voice-over-LTE: The Reason Why Your Phone May Soon Stop Working

#36

Post by tharkun__ »

edude03 wrote: post #24

> newer phones like the Samsung Galaxy J3 (2016) I know we are a more tech savvy crowd but is using a 7 year old feature phone really the best example to make this argument? I imagine that most people keep their phones closer to four years.

I think the sentence before that is more important though I do wonder if that is correct:

    In order to make a VoLTE phone call, your phone, your provider, the receiving phone and the intermediate network providers must all support the protocol.
The receiving phone? WTF?

So I can't use my VoLTE phone to call a land-line in another country? That would be stupid if true.

Meaning that really can't be true.

Re: Voice-over-LTE: The Reason Why Your Phone May Soon Stop Working

#37

Post by I_Am_Nous »

tharkun__ wrote: post #36
edude03 wrote: post #24

> newer phones like the Samsung Galaxy J3 (2016) I know we are a more tech savvy crowd but is using a 7 year old feature phone really the best example to make this argument? I imagine that most people keep their phones closer to four years.

I think the sentence before that is more important though I do wonder if that is correct: In order to make a VoLTE phone call, your phone, your provider, the receiving phone and the intermediate network providers must all support the protocol. The receiving phone ? WTF? So I can't use my VoLTE phone to call a land-line in another country? That would be stupid if true. Meaning that really can't be true.

On the other hand, SIP commonly has issues like one-way calls because all the data channels don't connect correctly. Easy peasy calling landlines though, it just runs through an ATA on the customer side and treats calls as a regular data stream. That's how our FTTH service is moving people from DSL+landline to fiber to feed all their services, including cable.

Re: Voice-over-LTE: The Reason Why Your Phone May Soon Stop Working

#38

Post by autoexec »

edude03 wrote: post #24

> newer phones like the Samsung Galaxy J3 (2016) I know we are a more tech savvy crowd but is using a 7 year old feature phone really the best example to make this argument? I imagine that most people keep their phones closer to four years.

> I know we are a more tech savvy crowd but is using a 7 year old feature phone really the best example to make this argument

The J3 isn't a feature phone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_Galaxy_J3

Re: Voice-over-LTE: The Reason Why Your Phone May Soon Stop Working

#40

Post by dangus »

kiwijamo wrote: post #11
gst wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some reason lots of Android phones (even the Pixel models from Google) seem to use a whitelist approach that is quite restrictive regarding where VoLTE is supported. For example at least up until recently (and probably still the case?) Pixel phones only supported VoLTE in countries that were in the list of countries in which the Google store official sold Pixel phones. Meanwhile newer iOS versions seem to nowaday…

And worse, it differs when roaming. I am aware there are networks where if you are their customer VoLTE works but if you are roaming onto their network it does not work at all. With the exact same device.

I’d have to think that a network that shuts down their 2G network probably allows roaming devices to make calls over VoLTE. All those carriers that don’t allow roaming devices to make VoLTE calls probably have an active 2G network.
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