INSIGHT

Bars on your phone but still struggling to send messages – what’s that about?

People might tell you that ‘having bars on your phone’ is what counts, but bars on your phone only tells you whether you have a strong downlink signal (downloads from network to user) or not, which is only part of the picture.

Reliable mobile communications needs both the downlink (network to user) and the uplink (user to network) paths to be robust and free of noise and interference, i.e. good signal levels, are required in both directions and the quality of those signals also needs to be good.

Improvement to the uplink is the biggest factor in achieving a better mobile user experience, especially in marginal signal areas. The uplink path is inherently lower power to begin with, (for reasons such as, to extend battery life,  SAR restrictions and idle mode operations) and is subject to more significant interference, distortion and signal reflections than the downlink path. It is also impossible to measure this uplink signal quality metric with a ‘bars on phones’ approach.

This is where Pan RF comes in. Where mobile coverage is sub-optimal in a building we can design and install a Pan RF Cell HUB Distributed Antenna System (DAS) to legally capture, boost and repeat external signals from any or all of the Mobile Network Operators inside the building, improving both the downlink and uplink signal strengths and signal quality, guaranteeing you a vastly improved mobile user experience.

Two hacks to improve your mobile experience when no Pan RF Cell HUB is available

• Try to reduce obstacles between you and the signal – building materials reduce the available signal so go outside or stand near a window (preferably open)
• Get away for the crowd to reduce competition for network capacity

Have some questions? Let’s talk!