Thanks for that. Coincidentally, a Filipino lady saying she was from TransACT rang me on Friday and it seemed pretty clear from our conversation she is part of TPG’s consolidation of all its call-centre business throughout its many subsidiaries into one call centre in Metro Manila.
I joked that she must be psychic, telling her I had just finished posting to a bulletin board making mention of iiNet’s recent email to me, and here she was calling to see if I had received that email! I also pointed out the irony that I had only just learnt via that same bulletin board that iiNet was now owned by TPG, the company which had been my original ISP back before there was a World Wide Web and back when the Total Peripherals Group was just a handful of shops selling printers et cetera who thought they could boost their sales of modems by going into the brand-new ISP business and operating out of an unused back room in one of those suburban shops – back then there were a total of three ISPs operating in the whole of Sydney and only TPG survives today.
I have posted the results of that call elsewhere on Choice’s website, since I thought the most critical outcome from a consumer action point of view was their insistence I would have to waive my Customer Service Guarantee rights or pay an extra $10 a month to remain with a TransACT shell and have those rights respected. See Telecommunications Customer Service Guarantee
Changing the setting from network preference “4G / 3G / 2G” to make it “3G / 2G” makes a difference to the number of signal bars visible on the phone
But as the first preference setting is not excluding using 3G for calls I am not sure if it is relevant to problem of incoming calls not working intermittently.
Different parts of Telstra are telling me opposite things about this setting.
No new buildings have been built between my location and nearby cell towers; but there are more and more Telstra (and other carrier) WiFi SSIDs visible in the vicinity.
Noting to do with the handset (although that is what Telstra has tried to claim) - I say this because i has been going on for so long that I have changed handsets and the problem has remained,.
And the type when it started was a model with a Telstra “blue tick” - can you believe the conversation => Telstra:“it’s your handset”; Me:“No I don’t think so as the handset type is [was] a type that Telstra sells with Blue Tick”; Telstra:“Did you buy it from Telstra?”; Me:“No”; Telstra:“handsets tested as worthy of blue tick only work as blue tick if you buy them from us”; Me:“You are joking! Besides I live within 35km of GPO which means I am not in “blue tick” region; and I have line of sight to aTelstra mobile tower” …
Myriad posts about similar problems with various makes & models of handsets.
And no they are not all android, visitors with iphones have problems at my place too,
Problem is with the phone network not supporting phone calls reliably when it is busy doing other things such as providing data communications for internet.
Can be congestion where there is insufficient bandwidth from the nearest tower(s) to enable a connection. Used to happen, when I had a work mobile, regularly in Brisbane especially around 5-6pm weekdays. No ring but a message saying missed call or voice message.
Gamma radiation, neutinos passing through, etc can affect integrated circuits very rarely (as per the anecdote about running the same program with the same data on five separate computers in the same location in the late sixties)
and if that was the cause of an individual phone call not occurring then the call would not occur correctly and would behave in the manner of dialling the wrong number - but this is not what we are talking about.
The situation being discussed is
from caller’s perspective the call did occur, and the network offered to send a SMS when it was ‘not answered’
from the receiver’s handset perspective the call did not occur
from a central data log point of view the call did occur without it being answered and hence a message was sent
from a different data log point of view the call did not occur and nothing appears in the Missed Calls log nor the Incoming Calls log.
When you make a phone call over a 3G or 4G network the analog voice signal is coded into digital data, then the data is sent in packets, each packet has a CRC to check that it arrives intact and unscrambled, etc … (I worked as a communications systems engineer with IBM, and have taught the basics to graduate hires & professional hires).
Yes I agree that it sounds like a congestion problem.
Either congestion in the cell serviced by the mobile phone tower, or congestion in the back haul used by the mobile phone tower (which would be optic fibre cable for the tower in my location).
The intermittent nature has all the hallmarks of network congestion.
And I suggest that the congestion is NOT caused by a high volume of phone calls at the affected times but by IS CAUSED by a high volume of data communications using the mobile cell for sessions with Internet.
Hence my suggestion for a campaign to ask that the mobile phone networks be required to prioritise phone calls over the other uses.
