Company ditching smart phones

Banzai_Joe

Banzai_Joe

Banzai_Joe

Soldato
Joined
30 Sep 2006
Posts
5,280
Location
Midlands, UK
So,
as I.T. Manager i rolled out nearly 40 Nokia Lumia 620 smart phones to employees last year. It works fine with Exchange, OneDrive etc, in other words the smart functions.....functions fine.
However, we are plagued by dropped/missed calls all day long.
We are on EE and there is a mast in line of sight about 800m from us. I've installed signal boosters in the building which gives us 4-5 bars everywhere.
However when the mast gets flooded to capacity with phone calls thats' when we get dropouts, and it's really bad.

So....the Board met (without me) and decided to ditch the lumias and iphones and go for standard 2G style none smart phones and give those employees ipads for all their emails and other data related stuff.

I had an employee test his lumia by switching it to 2G only and he said the dropouts and missed calls have reduced by quite a bit.

Having looked online it seems that EE (T-Mobile and Orange) are disconnecting quite a lot of masts around the UK, so expect this issue to get worse as existing masts get flooded with all networks and competitions for bandwidth gets more intense.

Anyone else done this?
Curious as to how it may pan out for us.
We're in contract with EE until April 2015, but we do seem to be in a dead zone for most networks.
 
I used too get this all the time with T-mobile a year back, I could never keep a call going for more then 10mins, sometimes it would constantly drop.
 
Got some bad news for your board....its nothing to do with the phones, it the sodding EE network.

I have a personal handset with Voda and work handset with EE, I constantly get the EE text messages with the 'you have missed a call' info on and calls always dropping mid sentence.

Can't remember the last dropped call I had on Vodafone, as I understand it has something to do with the frequency band that the networks operate at, in particular the fact that Vodafone's band is better for building penetration.

I could have course be wrong but it does seem to be true because if I stand in the middle of our warehouse I have a 3 bar signal on Voda and 0 bars with EE and as soon as I go outside I get full H+ with EE.
 
I hear ya Columbo. I get constant revolt against the lumia's with everyone saying how crap the phone is.
I constantly reply back, "it ain't the phone its the network". The iphones suffer as well. Yet my personal Lumia 620 running on VF has no such issues.
As we're still in contract with EE till next year, switching to 2G only seems to make it better. Our comms company have asked for full reports of all dropped/missed calls. He reckons that's the only way we'll get out of contract early with EE; by proving they aren't providing a service. But our users never supply me with details so that's a bust!
 
So how are your staff supposed to use the "smart functions"?, I assume their was a valid reason for heaving the features in the phone.
 
cu3ed said:
So how are your staff supposed to use the "smart functions"?, I assume their was a valid reason for heaving the features in the phone.
Click to expand...

With the iPad I'm guessing.

Also I think you will find users just blame the foreign item which for most of them is the Lumia phone, if it was the iPhone original I'm sure they would have put more of the blame on the network.
 
I'd get 2 mobiles on a different Network & test them alongside the **** that is EE. Stick 2 of the 620's on 3/GiffGaff/otherNetwork prove that it isn't the mobiles therefore not down to your earlier choice.
 
The EE/T-Mobile/Orange network are now absolute bilge. Constant dropped calls or notifications on my phone that I've missed a call and the phone didn't ring (known network problem)!!!
 
Oh i know it aint the phones, its the network for sure. But we've gone through every network tbh over the past 5 years, all have been bad, but, yes EE suck major balls this time round.
It's also been agreed, without my involvement, that we're going to trial the Galaxy S4 and S4 mini as replacements for the ageing iphones that we have. Why? We'll still be on EE with crap service.
They....DO NOT listen.

cu3ed, yes mate, as Fallen god said, they'll use their ipads for all smart functionality. Employees will be given the choice of ipad air or min retina.

4T5, just ordered 5 new phone connections on VF, mainly due to EE's lousy business plan where we cannot bolt on these new connections onto our existing tariff so they all finish together next year. You would think a business plan would avail this.
So, VF was the better bet for these as we can terminate easier. Plus we can see how the service fairs against EE.
 
Management, they are the same in any company, they mostly just do not understand technology at any level.

Even when it means telling them how to save huge amounts of money.
 
cu3ed said:
Management, they are the same in any company, they mostly just do not understand technology at any level.

Even when it means telling them how to save huge amounts of money.
Click to expand...

It's mainly management that **** things up. Most of the time they don't even agree with you but at the end of the day it's their call on every decision.

PS don't expect no dropouts even with 2G... we have non smart phones, non colour phones and we get dire performance still.
 
Any business should be using Vodafone. And I say this this as someone who has never used Vodafone at consumer level. They are top-dog in the UK for business contracts though.
 
Vodafone is like this in the City. It is really bad here. Luckily contract is up soon so will be moving soon, and Vodafone don't really care about fixing.

I have to use my 3 MiFi to get any usable internet.
 
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