Ride Along With a Real Verizon Wireless Tester

jonknee writes "So you're probably sick of the Can you hear me now? ads, but here's a new article about a real-life Verizon Wireless network tester. This guy logs over 3,000 miles a month in a station wagon decked out with over a quarter-million dollars worth of network gear (I dare say the most valuable station wagon ever?). An audio file is linked at the bottom of the article that has a few minute sample of the audio Verizon tests with. It's bizarre!"

One word.

Wardriving.

Best, wardriving vehicle, ever.

I beg to differ.

A tank would be so much cooler. It would give new meaning to WarDriving.

Although, you can't pick up chicks in a tank [redvsblue.com].

Can you

Verizon: You there? Good
Slashdot: Nothing to see here, move along

Almost makes Verizon seem like the good one ;)

Nice map

I can see where my nextel drops me everyday on the way home on 275 talking to my wife. Seriously.
/me calls verizon.

Re:Nice map

That's their way of telling you to get off the god damn phone while you're driving.

Re:Nice map

Why are you talking to your wife on the way home? You should be enjoying your last few moments of silence before dinner! dishes! hold me! sex and the city! blaaaaagh

Re:Nice map

Phone work great when I talk to everyone else

I'm sure Mrs. Frankenstein is happy to hear from you.

;)

Mobile debugging

I used to work at Motorola and we would, at times, have to bring an entire debugging setup out in the field. A van, with the phone test board, workstation, and logic analyzer all hooked up.

My friend does this for Nextel

A friend of mine does the same thing, except he works for Nextel. Needless to say, the job is quite boring.

Can you hear me now?

Uh no, not inside a building.

That's why I no longer have Verizon. Who cares if some jackass on a commercial can talk when he's in Death Valley...I couldn't get a signal inside. Now with my Sprint phone, at least I get one bar, which is just enough to get calls and head for the window. Verizon has nothing on Sprint or Nextel, both of which consistantly get better service here in Michigan. (at least for everyone I know)

Re:Can you hear me now?

I doubt if Sprint or Nextel has special inside-building towers. More likely they just happen to have a tower that's close enough to the various building you go into, and Verizon doesn't.

One sad thing about the U.S. cell system is that all there are so many incompatible cell protocols and systems. You get a phone that handles 3 or 4 different protocols, you worry about "roaming" charges -- and you still often find yourself in places where your particular provider just can't serve you.

The Europeans did the right thing when they agreed that all their providers would have to use GSM, so everybody's phone would work with everybody's network. U.S. providers complain that GSM doesn't use bandwidth efficiently. But from the consumer point of view, their hodge-podge of GSM alternates is really inefficient.

spinners

Yeah, but does the wireless tester have SPINNERS on it?

I hate those things....

Pimp My Ride

All that equipment but the guy really hoped that MTV and Xzibit would Pimp His Ride!!!

No wonder their service sucks...

...the tester gets a skewed view because he uses equipment worth 3/4 million whereas real users have to use a crappy phone that costs a few hundred.

Re:No wonder their service sucks...

Driving around with a cell phone will tell you you're losing your signal.

Driving around with an HP 8563 spectrum analyzer and a standard-gain antenna will tell you why you're losing your signal.

This is sorta important if you're in the cell-phone business.

Re:No wonder their service sucks...

Yeah, because the guys who run nationwide cell networks with thousands of nodes and millions of subscribers would never have thought of that. My god man, credit them with some intelligence!

Dropped Calls

"Dropped calls for Verizon Wireless are pretty rare these days, with some months of testing seeing none."

Well that's all fine and dandy for them. Unfortunately, I get a dropped call or two each week, in an area Verizon advertises as being completely covered.

Download the track?

Ok, what the fuck is an .amr file?

Re:Download the track?

Extension: AMR Program and/or Extension Function Company Adaptive Multi-Rate Codec Specific Notes Speech encoding format used in GSM telephony. MIME Type What's This? File Classification Associated Links * Player * Background Paper Identifying Characters: Hex: 23 21 41 4D 52 0A 34 ASCII: #!AMR.4

The 3/4 million car...

Um... are you sure its a good idea to publish a pic with the license plate number of a car carrying $750 000 worth of stuffZors?

Dude, where's my bar?

I hope that wagon's got airbags, because the driver's gotta be drinking heavily during his job.

Ahhh... The good old days

It seems like a lifetime ago, but I guess it was only about 11 or so years ago, I worked for a wireless engineering consultant firm in Arlington, VA. Among our many projects, one of the biggest during my time there was designing and building out the first Sprint PCS systems in DC, Seattle, and Portland.

We didn't own the vans we did drive testing in (the process of checking the signal by driving around with special equipment and software). We rented them. That was fun. We'd rent a nice brand new minivan from Budget or some car rental place and the first thing we'd do is rip out the dash board so we could run power cables to the alternator (I assume that's where they were plugging in. I dealt more with the software side).

In addition to some fairly expensive equipment, some of which our company designed, we also had specially modded PCS phones that, with a serial cable, would provide signal strength and other information to the computers.

We'd have maybe 3 or 4 laptops, each with a phone and GPS attached, and then we'd just go cruising around town recording signal strength, intereference measurements, and so on.

And if it wasn't just plain old geeky fun, the young engineers involved were simply a great group of people and we had a blast doing it together. And somehow we usually managed to get the minivans put back together well enough that we never got sued.

Thanks for the memories. I haven't thought about the old drive testing days in quite some time.

The Other Side

I'd like to see them air a commercial from the point of view of the poor guy stuck at his desk all day...

"....yes....yes....yes....yes....yes....yes...."

Doing something about service..

They've put up a shitload more antennas. It's interesting that people haven't noticed, because they've been camoflauged [utilitycamo.com].

Re:sigh - I've had a bad day...

FFS, *somebody* buy the slashdot editors a copy of StyleWriter.

Ha, I know this is off-topic, but I find it hilarious that their site has an example image [editorsoftware.com] of a document that's been "fixed" by StyleWriter. One of the sentences has been corrected to "I assume you'll dealing this soon..." Are you sure the slashdot editors don't already have a copy? :)