Your Cellphone Frustrations, Validated
Why making a mobile phone call is so miserable right now.
If there’s anywhere I expect to get cellphone reception, it’s TIME’s Manhattan offices, which overlook beautiful Bryant Park and the thousands of people milling about below who are all probably also on their cellphones. TIME’s offices are in midtown Manhattan—the center of the financial universe—and we are, interestingly, in a building where Verizon has many offices. But I usually have one bar on my Verizon phone in the offices, and if I am not connected to Wi-Fi, I can’t make a call. This was the inspiration for a story that published recently and that I’ve made a few media appearances on since:
You’re Not Imagining It, Cellphone Reception is Getting Worse
This poor reception is something I puzzled over every time I go into the office, and the more I thought about it, the more I noticed it in other places. Try to make a call on my cellphone from my house, from my parents’ house, from my car, from just about anywhere, and I was met with garbled reception and dropped calls. I started Googling around and not finding much of anything, so I talked to some analysts—and still did not find much of anything.
It wasn’t until I talked to Craig Moffett, an analyst who has covered the telecom industry for more than 30 years, that I finally started making progress. The problem, he told me, was that cellphone signals are transmitted over electromagnetic waves, just as radio signals are. The lower the band on the spectrum, the further signal can travel, which is why you can sometimes hear AM radio from other states. But the midband of the spectrum is getting very crowded as more people use more and more data. So what Verizon, my carrier, did, Moffett says, is decided to go after the ultra high-frequency bands of the spectrum. That spectrum was available because high frequency waves have a harder time traveling far and penetrating walls and buildings. That bet has not paid off, he says, since Verizon’s high-frequency spectrum waves have not proven very good at going very far.
Now, Verizon and AT&T both spent tens of billions of dollars on mid-frequency waves of the spectrum—but according to Verizon, they’re using that spectrum for 5G and specifically, for people who pay $10 a month extra for 5G. To get their high-frequency spectrum to go farther, they probably need to build more towers.
I was interviewed on Marketplace about this story, you can find the tape here: The fix for crummy cell reception? Probably more towers.
I was also interviewed on TV on NBC Morning News Now, which I think is NBC’s streaming news? I hate doing TV appearances, especially about things I am not an expert on, so you can watch me be awkward on TV, if you really want, here: Can You Hear Me Now?
I am also going to be on KQED, San Francisco’s public radio station, Tuesday at 9 am Pacific time, talking about Invitation Homes and my 2019 story on the single-family rental industry. Depressing fact: though a lot of publications followed my reporting about the shoddy practices of companies like Invitation Homes and American Homes 4 Rent, these companies’ share prices are trading above what they were when I wrote the story. Why? Because there’s such a housing shortage and they have a lot of inventory.
I also wrote a story about what the government is doing about robocalls. It was short.
Robocalls Finally Have the U.S. Government’s Attention
Also, since where else can I vent such frustrations, I would like to point out that a Wall Street Journal story has been making the rounds this week that echoes the premise—and headline—of my story from earlier this year. Mine was Why Return to Office Plans Spell Trouble for Working Moms. Theirs was Return To Office Mandates Are a Disaster for Working Moms. Both talked about women’s labor force participation and RTO mandates. As my friend Emily would say, put that in your pipe and smoke it.
BFAT. Books To Fall Asleep To.
This week I present a book that I liked—mostly—until I Googled the author and found that she is the spokeswoman for RFK Jr.’s campaign (and is married to his son) and has some not-helpful social media posts about vaccines. It’s called Life Undercover: Coming of Age in the CIA by Amaryllis Fox, and it’s about a woman who was recruited into the CIA’s clandestine ops division and flew and lived all over the world working for the CIA. It’s an interesting window into what it’s like to work for the CIA and be a spy and also why, for someone who doesn’t really support war, it is an unsustainable career.