Recent decline in signal/service at home.

[raidrum]

I recently bought a new, unused, stock LG G2 to replace a gray market unlocked BLU Products phone because after years of being with T-Mobile with various phones, then sliding on over to Family Mobile (Walmarts discounted subsidiary T-Mobile service), my signal dropped consistently - mainly at home. My service was fine for years before and for about the first year I switched to Family Mobile from T-Mobile, but then, I developed very poor signal at home within the past 6 months.

I thought there was something wrong with the BLU phone, so I bought the G2 about a month ago. Same problem, no difference. At home, signal was going from 0 bars to 2 bars maximum every 10 seconds making phone calls impossible. I need the phone for business so you can imagine this problem is extra bad for me. When I'm out running around, my signal does reach maximum bars at times. This was the same case with the previous phone. This usually happens without rhyme or reason, but within a 1/2 mile radius from home, it's still very poor signal. After being with T-Mobile for years, it's mighty weird that this developed recently.

I've called customer service about 9 times within 2 months. It was no help. They checked service/towers/coverage and everything is fine well covered in my area apparently. I've been all over the web looking for answers, especially regarding a winning APN. I've used Family Mobile recommended APN settings, T-Mobile's recommended APN settings, I even used a combination of the two with Family Mobile APN with T-Mobiles MMSC. and vica versa. I also bought a new Family Mobile SIM card. So far, that's helped the most. I now usuallly drop down to one bar, no less, and stay there while at home but it's still not good enough. I also get 4G LTE now since installing and activating the new SIM, but data isn't steady either, and pages load slowly routinely.

As I understand, the At&t G2 uses the same and more bands than T-Mobile, so tower reception should be fine. Do any of you have an idea of what direction to go next? Is it a problem that this is a AT&T branded phone that I'm trying to put on the the Family Mobile network? An unknown to me tweak to the APN?

 

[Crashdamage]

The APN only affects the data service. It has nothing to do with Voice service.

If you were still with T-Mobile postpaid, they would 'loan' a home cellspot signal booster free.

The AT&T phone will work on the T-Mobile network, but lacks Band 12, which is T-Mobile's new, and most effective data band. It's not available everywhere though, so if Band 12 is not in your area it doesn't matter.

To get the correct APN settings for Family Mobile, have their tech support send them to your phone remotely.

Android since v1.0. Linux since 2001.

 

[raidrum]

I spoke to customer service, again. I think this was call number 10 in past three months. I asked for a technician to push the APN to my phone remotely. No tech department, just a nice girl that I could understand this time, but she had no intention of doing what I asked. Instead, she tried her best to go over all the same things all the other customer service reps have tried all the previous times. The best she could do after about half an hour of trying was to open up two tickets for the "engineers". She assured me they would fix my issue. I'm 99% sure they won't. Apparently the "engineers" are going to do "something" (I don't know what) on their end within the next 3 to 5 days to fix my issue. Blahh. Looks like I'll have to see about AT&T service, which I wasn't looking forward to since T-Mobile and their subsidiary service is much more expansive in my area of Southern California than AT&T.