Callers Hear Rings - Phones Not Ringing In Strong Signal/Good Coverage Area

Is this happening to you or somebody you know?

-Caller calls a SprintPCS number and gets approximately 4 rings and
then goes to voicemail.

-Owner of the phone hears nothing even in good coverage area with 4
bars of signal.


This has been happening to me I believe for a long time but I have just
confirmed it on 3 different brand and model phones. I also have
reports from other family members and friends with the same problem in
different service areas.

Sprint try's to blame this on your phone and suggests going and
standing in line to check your phone at a service center. Your phone
is brand new and has no service issues on record.

Why should this happen without the caller either getting a busy signal
or going straight to voicemail without ringing?


Please Advise Us,
Frustrated long time SprintPCS customer in Los Angeles Area

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› See More: Callers Hear Rings - Phones Not Ringing In Strong Signal/Good Coverage Area

I have had this happen occasionally. Don't know why...I usually chock
it up to the system "forgetting" where my phone is, or some other
glitch that causes the system to not route the call to me.

However, I would be interested in knowing why (for real).

pmkjvw602 wrote:
> Is this happening to you or somebody you know?
>
> -Caller calls a SprintPCS number and gets approximately 4 rings and
> then goes to voicemail.
>
> -Owner of the phone hears nothing even in good coverage area with 4
> bars of signal.
>
>
> This has been happening to me I believe for a long time but I have just
> confirmed it on 3 different brand and model phones. I also have
> reports from other family members and friends with the same problem in
> different service areas.
>
> Sprint try's to blame this on your phone and suggests going and
> standing in line to check your phone at a service center. Your phone
> is brand new and has no service issues on record.
>
> Why should this happen without the caller either getting a busy signal
> or going straight to voicemail without ringing?
>
>
> Please Advise Us,
> Frustrated long time SprintPCS customer in Los Angeles Area


This is caused by being on an NID border not because of weak signal.
Sprint divides their SID's into a number of smaller NID's in each
market. If you're right on the border of two towers that are each on
different NID's (yes it's actually very common) you will miss about 20%
or more of your incoming calls. What happens is that the CDMA
technology uses the slot cycle and paging channel system. But if your
phone is bouncing back and forth between towers on different NID's your
calls will get lost in the paging channel as the the network won't be
able to locate your phone in time to receive the incomning call. This
however does not affect outgoing calls which can work just find on an
NID border.

This is CDMA's achilles heal. If the CDMA vendors can somehow come up
with a seamless cure for the inter-switch problem CDMA will be the best
technology by far.

Larry,

Thanks for the explaination. This is a huge problem! I figured it had
nothing to do with the signal.

Can't they have the caller hear "trying to locate Sprint customer
please wait" instead of hear a ring that is not "really" ringing?

This makes you think that the person just does not answer their phone.
I have got angry at my wife more than once over this. I really have
seen a lot of this happen with many people it seems.

Also the message notification does not work either so you could wait a
long time before you even know somebody was trying to get hold of you
for something important. I am not sure if this is part of the same
problem?

They had better fix this soon or I will be one person that gets another
service. I am sure with all the people in large metropolitan areas in
view of many towers I am not the only one.

[email protected] wrote:
> pmkjvw602 wrote:
> > Is this happening to you or somebody you know?
> >
> > -Caller calls a SprintPCS number and gets approximately 4 rings and
> > then goes to voicemail.
> >
> > -Owner of the phone hears nothing even in good coverage area with 4
> > bars of signal.
> >
> >
> > This has been happening to me I believe for a long time but I have just
> > confirmed it on 3 different brand and model phones. I also have
> > reports from other family members and friends with the same problem in
> > different service areas.
> >
> > Sprint try's to blame this on your phone and suggests going and
> > standing in line to check your phone at a service center. Your phone
> > is brand new and has no service issues on record.
> >
> > Why should this happen without the caller either getting a busy signal
> > or going straight to voicemail without ringing?
> >
> >
> > Please Advise Us,
> > Frustrated long time SprintPCS customer in Los Angeles Area
>
>
> This is caused by being on an NID border not because of weak signal.
> Sprint divides their SID's into a number of smaller NID's in each
> market. If you're right on the border of two towers that are each on
> different NID's (yes it's actually very common) you will miss about 20%
> or more of your incoming calls. What happens is that the CDMA
> technology uses the slot cycle and paging channel system. But if your
> phone is bouncing back and forth between towers on different NID's your
> calls will get lost in the paging channel as the the network won't be
> able to locate your phone in time to receive the incomning call. This
> however does not affect outgoing calls which can work just find on an
> NID border.
>
> This is CDMA's achilles heal. If the CDMA vendors can somehow come up
> with a seamless cure for the inter-switch problem CDMA will be the best
> technology by far.

The way the CDMA paging channel works is that a caller will hear
artifically generated rings on their end as the network tries to locate
your phone to deliver the incoming call. So often times the caller
will hear 2 or 3 rings on their end before you hear any. With other
technologies like GSM there will just be a delay until the network can
locate your phone in which case the rings will begin once the phone is
located. CDMA creates those fake rings until the paging channel
locates your phone.

CDMA technology cannot give a "trying to locate the Sprint customer"
message like that. I suppose it's possible to do but it's not
presently designed like that. The only way this can be fixed is if the
CDMA vendors can develop a fix in a future software upgrade for the
networks.

I have never had trouble with receiving messages or voicemail
notifications. If a call rolls to voicemail and my phone doesn't ring
in time to get the call I usually get the voicemail notifications
within 2 minutes or less if a message is left.

If CDMA vendors can fix these trouble issues for incoming call delivery
it will be an awesome technology that blows away the others.

pmkjvw602 wrote:
> Is this happening to you or somebody you know?
>
> -Caller calls a SprintPCS number and gets approximately 4 rings and
> then goes to voicemail.
>
> -Owner of the phone hears nothing even in good coverage area with 4
> bars of signal.

> This has been happening to me I believe for a long time but I have just
> confirmed it on 3 different brand and model phones.

Care to list what models? Also, is it happening in specific areas, or
does it consistently happen regardless of where the phone is located?

> Sprint try's to blame this on your phone and suggests going and
> standing in line to check your phone at a service center. Your phone
> is brand new and has no service issues on record.


Well, in SOME cases that is a valid possible cause. Older phones
contain older MSM chipsets, and are tuned differently than newer phones.
Meanwhile, the network is constantly getting tweaked to take advantage
of the efficiencies built into the newer model phones. While 3G CDMA is
"backward compatible" with older handsets, the reality is taht older
handsets will still work on the upgraded network, just not quite as well
as they used to.

BUt, you're saying your phone is brand new. It would help if you listed
what models they are. Some handset models and brands are known to be
particularly poor at signal reception, while others are far better. You
wouldn't happen to be using Samsung or LG phones, would you?

> Why should this happen without the caller either getting a busy signal
> or going straight to voicemail without ringing?

Because that's not the way a switch configured for CDMA works. When a
person on another phone calls a CDMA handset, and the network doesn't
know the state of the phone being called, then the switch at the other
end will play a ringback tone anyway while it tries to locate that
handset. The ringback is to pacify the caller, and let them know that
the call request has been received and work is being done. If the cell
phone IS located and connected to, then the ringback will just continue
until either someone answers or the ring times out to voicemail. If the
phone can't be found after a certain period of time, then the call just
rolls to VM.

Note though that in CDMA, once a phone is *known* to be off the network,
then all subsequent calls go straight to VM UNTIL the phone re-registers.

This IS different from the way GSM networks treat calls. But there are
different philosophies at work for why each method is implemented.

--
E-mail fudged to thwart spammers.
Transpose the c's and a's in my e-mail address to reply.

Congestion in the paging channel (capacity issues) on Sprint's end can
also be another cause for this. But much more likely it's an NID
boundary situation. Sprint has one NID border between switch 00003 and
00004 that runs right through a major populated area of LA County and
causes a lot of havoc for many customers.

Despite what Sprint and others might try to claim the phone is rarely
to blame for this.

The whole idea of artificial generated rings is odd to me. Why make
someone who is calling think that your phone is ringing when it is not?
When your phone is off and in communication with one tower properly
the caller hears no rings as it should. I believe this should be the
same way if the system is not properly connected to your phone. Or
better yet says "trying to locate the cellular customer". I guess it
would be even nicer if you could choose this as an option in your
personal profile for those who do not want others to know they are on a
cell phone.

Until the network can be truly fixed this should be the temporary fix.
Does not seem to be too much work?? Since this is one of the worst
Sprint network issues I think it merits a band-aid for now.

As far as the voicemail notifications I will save this for another
subject if it is not part of this network issue?? It seems there has
been much talk on this before.

Isaiah,

I have Sanyo 4920 and 4930's which do not have the problems you are
stating.

However if a fix was put in place callers would not hear a ring if
someone had a not so good phone that by the way was chosen and sold by
Sprint to begin with and was not in a communicated handshake with only
one tower.

Correct?

Yes but there is a MUCH better chance that if you hear a ring it is
ringing on the other end when it comes to a land line phone compared to
calling a SprintPCS cell phone.