Questions about mobile phone receptions

[Rainbowinthesky]

I am with orange and have a nokia phone. I have to go outside of my house to get reception. My son is with o2 and can get a reception inside the house fine. According to a website to check coverage my area if very good for orange. It has been suggested it is something to do with the construction of my house ie what's in teh walls that is affecting my reception.
Can this be true? What can I do to improve it so I can use my mobile inside?
THe whole point I got a contract was to save money on my landline calling mobiles...

no its pants. o2 have the best coverage, thats why you pay more for it..

Unlikely in my view to be the house, unless it's a new build with lots of metal girders which cause a box effect.

Have you used Ofcom SiteFinder to establish which masts are in your area? I find that is better than the service providers Check Coverage Area facilities. Some masts are GSM some are UTMS. Frequency ranges vary. In my area, Orange has a mast with GSM 1800MHz and a mast with UTMS 2100MHz

My Nokia E71 has a setting under Phone Settings: Network to change between Dual Mode and UTMS. If you have that setting on your phone, try changing it from Dual to UTMS or from UTMS to Dual. Can sometimes help, though will be dependant on what masts are in your area.

It may be true. Orange and T-Mobile (and therefore Virgin Mobile also, since it uses the network of T-Mobile) work only on 1800 MHz

O2 and Vodafone started their networks only on 900 MHz (and in the past, some phones could not be 'unlocked' to be used for Orange/T-Mobile as they didn't cover the correct frequency band).

With the higher frequency (1800 MHz) the wavelength of the radio waves is smaller and sometime lengths of wire will react differently (and attenuate the signal).

If you check sites like www.gsmarena.com for different phones, you will find that some are dual band, some tri-band (1900 MHz is used instead of 1800 MHz in USA) and some are quad band (2100 MHz is being used here for 3G phone traffic).

Since you have found problems with Orange, I expect the same sort of problem might affect T-Mob (+ VM) but you may find Vodafone (and therefore Asda) would work OK, alongside O2.

I don't follow the exact coverage stats but expect all the networks have somewhere above 95% coverage for population (but big gaps in mountainous areas in Wales and Scotland). O2/Voda might have some slight advantage in such areas, as the higher the frequency, the more likely there will be problems if there's no "line of sight" to the cell mast. For comparison TV signals are in the 500 to 800 MHz area and have wide coverage, and FM radio is in the under 150 MHz area and work well even in built-up areas (where mobile phones only work because they have placed a lot of cell masts in towns and cities).

So the lower the MHz the better, is that right? Thus why O2 works best quite often as GSM traffic may often be at 900MHz.

Not better but different - the higher frequencies are used for carrying more data (eg 3G for video streaming to an iPhone).

For signal attenuation, different materials will affect different frequencies in varying ways, which is why sometimes a building will reflect some bands but absorb others.

GSM traffic is on 900 and 1800. The old analogue phones (pre-GSM) were audible if you had a radio scanner which went up to 1000 MHz (eg AOR 1000 - it went up to 1300 MHz but had 1000 stores for pre-sets - not the 20 to 200 most regular FM/AM/DAB tuners have).