that’s whacked

disabling verizon evdo

Thursday, Dec 21. 2006  –  Category: Musings

I moved offices recently, and noticed some serious deficiency in my cell phone, both in charge and in coverage…. I noticed my battery drained considerably quicker, and would run out around 2pm (despite an overnight charge) when it was normally good for at least a day and a half. And a lot of my calls would cut in and out and then drop.

I flipped it open and watched the signal strength. It would start at 1 bar, after a few seconds, go up to 2 bars, after a few more seconds, go up to 3 bars, and then after about 5 seconds it would go to 4 bars, which usually means pretty high strength. What was peculiar was that I then saw it switch from 1xRTT (older/slower data communications) to EVDO (Verizon’s high speed data), at which point it would drop back down to 0 bars.

After some Googling, I tried disabling EVDO on my phone and that seems to have solved it so far. I’m getting a consistent strong 3/4 bar signal in 1xRTT mode (which is fine, since I don’t use the EVDO data rate anyway). Hopefully this is a good long term solution while I’m stuck in my Verizon contract.