Poor Sprint LTE reception

[owba]

About a year and a half ago the company that owns the cell towers in my area (Winchester, VA) upgraded their towers to LTE for Sprint. My S4 worked great and the reception at home and work was wonderful. I can see a tower from both my home and office. Enter the S6 last Friday. I am lucky to have one bar unless I am sitting directly under a tower. After talking to some of the folks at BB yesterday I was told to switch it to CDMA only and that I would get better reception. This is true, I switched and have better reception, but I really don't want 3G speeds when my network is LTE capable and the phone is supposed to be LTE capable. I feel like I have a two year newer phone that in a major way is 5 years older than my S4. Looking at Sprints coverage map, Spark is only in the bigger cities which is about an hour from me and since the company that owns the towers just upgraded to LTE 1.5 years ago I wonder how long it will take before they upgrade to Spark. I have commented on a thread in Sprints Forums on the subject and all the Sprint folks could do is check to see if there is tower outage which I know there isn't. A gentleman posted today that he was having the same issue in a major city that has Spark.

So the question is, take it back or wait for a fix. Anyone else experiencing this? I really don't know much about the radio side of these phones and what I could possibly do to help this. Any advise would be appreciated. Again I have switched to CDMA only but that feels like having Siruis in a new car but only being able to listed to AM radio.

 

[Golfdriver97]

I can only think of a few options:
1. You can try exchanging the device you have for another. This may or may not help. Before doing this, I would make sure that the device you are getting is another new one, not a possible refurbished one.

2. Cancel the upgrade and go back to your older phone. Sure not the greatest of options, but at least you can utilize what you pay for.

3. Select a different new phone. I'm not trying to say the S6 is a bad phone, but there may not be too many more viable options in this kind of situation.

4. Select a different carrier. Sprint's Spark rollout has been somewhat slow, at best. I know some coworkers that got Spark in our area, and they didn't notice much of a difference in speeds.

As for your specific question to take it back or wait for a fix. I wouldn't really wait for a fix. Sprint may not give a straight answer to when your city will get Spark, if the reps you talk to even have information on upcoming cities.

Sorry for the long winded answer. Apologies if I sounded harsh as well.

 

[cwise222]

Your area could also be in the process of getting upgraded to Sprint Spark which in turn in causing the signal issues. About a year ago when I worked for Sprint and had the G2 I had nothing but signal issues after it was updated to activate the 'Spark' bands. Until the tower is running all 3 bands or only has Band 25 & 26 with no work being done on the 3rd band it's going to cause issues. My G2 would flip between all the LTE bands like crazy as they were working on them because it kept trying to default to the stronger LTE bands but they weren't ready. I was still having issues with it when I got laid off 5 months after they started working on the tower.

Long story short you'll have LTE issues on Spark phones if your area is undergoing the upgrade to the towers, but the only way to know is if you get the right rep who a) is willing to look up the tower in your area and b) knows that there is a system/program that can be used to check the towers upgrades that gives more then general information.

 

[atishc]

About a year and a half ago the company that owns the cell towers in my area (Winchester, VA) upgraded their towers to LTE for Sprint. My S4 worked great and the reception at home and work was wonderful. I can see a tower from both my home and office. Enter the S6 last Friday. I am lucky to have one bar unless I am sitting directly under a tower. After talking to some of the folks at BB yesterday I was told to switch it to CDMA only and that I would get better reception. This is true, I switched and have better reception, but I really don't want 3G speeds when my network is LTE capable and the phone is supposed to be LTE capable. I feel like I have a two year newer phone that in a major way is 5 years older than my S4. Looking at Sprints coverage map, Spark is only in the bigger cities which is about an hour from me and since the company that owns the towers just upgraded to LTE 1.5 years ago I wonder how long it will take before they upgrade to Spark. I have commented on a thread in Sprints Forums on the subject and all the Sprint folks could do is check to see if there is tower outage which I know there isn't. A gentleman posted today that he was having the same issue in a major city that has Spark.

So the question is, take it back or wait for a fix. Anyone else experiencing this? I really don't know much about the radio side of these phones and what I could possibly do to help this. Any advise would be appreciated. Again I have switched to CDMA only but that feels like having Siruis in a new car but only being able to listed to AM radio.

Did you apply the OTA update, and then update your profile and PRL?

Posted via the Android Central App

 

[owba]

Yes, everything is updated!

 

[Gator352]

Yes, everything is updated!

Mine too. My bars hardly ever get above one or two where my note 3 and iPhone have 3 to 5 bars.

Posted via the Android Central App

 

[Bandit099]

I'm having similar issues, heavily considering swapping it out for a different device. Sitting at my desk in my office my Moto X would get 3-4 bars of LTE and pull between 5-8mbps download speeds, my S6 in the same exact scenario wont even pick up LTE and only gets 2-3 bars 3G with speeds often below 1mbps download speeds. I also run into the issue of the data connection stalling and not picking up a signal at all, I live in Denver and should be getting Spark, my area is even rated as their excellent coverage for Spark. Unfortunately I don't have a way to test and see if its isolated to my phone or if its a Sprint network issue or an S6 as a whole issue, but when I called Sprint about the problem they said there were no Tower tickets, they did a few things to troubleshoot and nothing worked. I updated PRL and Profile several times and nothing improves it, even did a factory reset. I'm going to give it a few more days and see if I can find someone with another Sprint phone to do a side-by-side comparison, but I cant sit around and wait for Sprint to "troubleshoot" this and let my 14-day exchange window lapse and be stuck with sub par device.

Other than this issue, I love the phone. Its my first Samsung device and I don't think touchwiz is to bad and the extra features have been nice.

 

[leeborden1]

The Sprint forums have quite a few posts from unhappy customers experiencing major connection / reception issues with the S6 and S6 Edge. In fact, I would say there are a lot of pretty pissed-off people. I would have thought the general Android community would have heard more buzz about it.

I purchased two S6s last Saturday and went from three or four bars at home and at the office (on my old HTC EVO 4G LTE) to zero or one bar on my S6. My son is experiencing the same thing with his.

So, I went to the Sprint forums to see if anyone else was having similar issues, and was a bit floored by what I saw. A bunch of people are having the same problem. Sprint and Samsung are basically ignoring the issue. They have posted saying something like "the is a known device issue. We're working on it and will keep you updated." That was on Monday. They have had nothing to say since then, even though there have been numerous posts complaining about the problem - from all over the country.

I, too have updated everything and have tried everything I can think of and have read to try and solve the problem on my end, but nothing has helped.

I find it difficult to believe that Sprint and Samsung is just ignoring the problem since I'm sure both are loosing customers over it. I know of at least four of my friends who have returned their S6s because of it. Two of them jumped ship from Sprint and went to other providers. But so far, they're not saying a thing. Most people are reporting that when they contact Sprint tech support, support replies that this is the first they have heard of the problem... even though Sprint admins on the forums have said this is a known issue and it's being worked on.

I have another week on my 14 day return policy, so I'm waiting until next week to see what happens. I really like the S6, except that half the time I can't make or receive calls, and I can't send or receive texts. Obviously, a phone isn't worth much if it can't be use as a phone. So if nothing gets resolved I'll return our phones, jump ship, and take my four lines to another provider and try the S6 there.

 

[cardboard60]

About a year and a half ago the company that owns the cell towers in my area (Winchester, VA) upgraded their towers to LTE for Sprint. My S4 worked great and the reception at home and work was wonderful. I can see a tower from both my home and office. Enter the S6 last Friday. I am lucky to have one bar unless I am sitting directly under a tower. After talking to some of the folks at BB yesterday I was told to switch it to CDMA only and that I would get better reception. This is true, I switched and have better reception, but I really don't want 3G speeds when my network is LTE capable and the phone is supposed to be LTE capable. I feel like I have a two year newer phone that in a major way is 5 years older than my S4. Looking at Sprints coverage map, Spark is only in the bigger cities which is about an hour from me and since the company that owns the towers just upgraded to LTE 1.5 years ago I wonder how long it will take before they upgrade to Spark. I have commented on a thread in Sprints Forums on the subject and all the Sprint folks could do is check to see if there is tower outage which I know there isn't. A gentleman posted today that he was having the same issue in a major city that has Spark.

So the question is, take it back or wait for a fix. Anyone else experiencing this? I really don't know much about the radio side of these phones and what I could possibly do to help this. Any advise would be appreciated. Again I have switched to CDMA only but that feels like having Siruis in a new car but only being able to listed to AM radio.

Didn't everybody say they wanted a metal Band around the phone like the Iphone had ?
And the phone with the Plastic back was not nice enough. There were reasons for no metal band in my Book.
But that don't sell phones.
Don't your have a metal Band around it.
The Iphone has always had reception problems in 4G LTE compared to the S4 & S5

 

[Almeuit]

I wonder if this is just the Sprint variant with this issue. I actually get better signal everywhere with my T-Mobile S6 / service.

 

[devoxxx]

I wonder if this is just the Sprint variant with this issue. I actually get better signal everywhere with my T-Mobile S6 / service.

This is exactly as you say a sprint varriant but combined with phone issues it only make it worse on the signal. I have a unlocked S6 edge. In my home on LTE I get 1 bar and lots of drops. On 3G i get 2-3 bars less drops and more battery life. I have sprint locally and a few of my friends have this device on other providers. We live in new mexico, so yes adobe house that are giant dead zones for signal. What we have been able to do with sprint and verizon is when the signal is absolute and utter crap (1 bar LTE) we simple switch to 3G and it works much better as well as inproves our battery life. The major problem i have is that my phone is contantly swaping between the diffrent data bands on automatic i only get like 3 hours of battery life on a full charge. As for T-mobile the signal is fine as well working with AT&T.