Click on the map to join the Berkeleyside Berkeley iPhone faceoff discussion!
There’s a spirited conversation at berkeleyside.com on the relative merits of the AT&T and Verizon iPhones.
Carol told my cousin Mimi that there’s nothing I like more than being dropped into a new city with maps and a guidebook … so I love maps.
When I discovered the Wintec WBT-202 GPS Data Logger I was in mapping heaven… I could see exactly where I’d been, and useHoudahGeo to automatically geotag my photos … no matter where in the world I took them.
So how better to satisfy my love and maps with my inner-engineer’s love of research and analysis .. than to create a map of the Verizon iPhone Signal strength.
We had a particularly varied route in today’s Berkeley Tour – Thousand Oaks neighborhood to upper Albany, then past the Marin Circle, up Spruce and Shasta Road in the Berkeley Hlls, down through Northbrae, North Berkeley, Le Conte, Elmwood and Rockridge … then through North Berkeley and back home to the Thousand Oaks Neighborhood.
I jotted down the Verizon signal strength, then annotated the GPS map of today’s journeys.
The Alameda/Hopkins to Martin Luther King/Rose nexus has been a real black hole of AT&T service – I’d almost always lose the call when driving along that route. Someone else commented that Marin & Santa Fe was particularly bad. Verizon had 3 bars at the both locations, and I was even able to make (and keep) a phone call there.
More amazingly – last week when previewing homes in the Park Hills neighborhood east of Grizzly Peak … I was able to call Carol (she was about 50 feet away and we were also able to wave to each other). That’s been an AT&T dead zone for years.
I didn’t test my assumption that more bars would lead to better quality calls, and better data transfer … but I think it’s fair to assume that few bars would result in lower quality calls and data.
You’d expect that major streets with commercial buildings would have better cell coverage. I was delighted to see how strong the signal was in residential areas of Albany, Berkeley and the Berkeley Hills.
This blog post is dedicated to S.I. Cheng, my Cooper Union Chemical Engineering Professor, whose mantra “Collect Data – Publish” was imprinted into my psyche.
