Idea #3: Dropped Call Registry
There’s been a lot of talk lately about the iPhone, AT&T vs. Verizon coverage maps, and dropped calls. I have certainly experienced dropped calls here in Austin during the holidays. I was even contacted by an AT&T Social Media Manager (ATTNicole) to get more details about my dropped calls. This is nice and I’m glad she is asking. But I thought to myself, what we really need is a web site which delivers this info to the cell phone companies en masse.
A site like Time Capsule Dead, but for dropped calls.
Initially, it’d be a database app with the following fields:
Carrier:
Date/Time:
City:
Nearest Intersection:
Phone Hardware:
Firmware Version:
The data could be collected, aggregated by geographic location (city, or even mapping the intersection) to help find hotspots of FAIL for a particular carrier, time of day, and location.
What say you?
Known Implementations:
Mark The Spot (AT&T only, data not public) (hat tip: @maczter)
Related:
Gizmodo article about Mark The Spot (hat tip: @maczter)
Sensorly – an app which collects phone data and builds real coverage maps from its users’ phones (hat tip: @lennysan)
Hmm…
AT&T is doing this with the “Mark The Spot” app released a couple of weeks ago.
More info here:
http://appshopper.com/utilities/att-mark-the-spot
http://gizmodo.com/5420524/mark-the-spot-iphone-app-tells-att-where-they-suck
While a lot of people initially say “how can I report a spot with no service if I have no service, you can do it as long as you’re willing to fire up the app so it can grab your location, then fill in the info and move or travel to somewhere where you actually do have service.
I really think this is cool — kind of like a BSOD log file for Windows but treating a dropped call on a cell phone like the crash.
I’d add details on the hardware & firmware version… but that’s about my only nit. All told that information should be easy to capture and send to a server upon next data or wireless network connection.
CHris
I use the AT&T mark the spot app, too.
I’m glad the Mark the Spot app is there. I guess it doesn’t work too well if the network is having problems, but it has the benefit of *not* being self-reported (which is subject to abuse). What I am thinking of here is something that’s cross-carrier and public, which no telecom company will ever provide.
Interesting idea. Carriers maintain their own (very detailed) data on calls that actually get dropped, but that data won’t become public, and also doesn’t account for calls that couldn’t be made because of a lack of signal. So something that reported dead zones would be useful for both carriers and the public, and dropped call info would be useful to the public.
+1 on the idea of something that isn’t self-reported because of potential abuse, but agreed that it is paradoxical for reporting network outtages.
This could be useful if you were trying to determine which carrier to go with based on where you live, whether your cell phone would work at the apartment you’re looking at, and the more general “is it down for everyone or just me” for a particular location.