[jlinder]

I've been a curve user (AT&T 8300) for about a year now, never have been happy with the cell reception in my area but it's rural and nobody seems to have great signal everywhere. The one area that it's really a problem is my home, as I'm self employed and work from home quite a bit. I installed a repeater to help with the lack of reception, talked to AT&T techs and nothing has really helped with the constant dropped calls and lousy service. I recently decided to try a T-Mobile curve, mostly because I could make calls over my wi-fi network in my home regardless of the cell signal. I've got the UMA part to work great at my home, even with a terrible T-Mobile cell signal. It goes from 1 bar to sos depending on where I am in the house. When driving around the past couple of days, I'm really shocked with the lack of network signal even though the T-mobile coverage map shows decent signal in most areas around my home town. I've talked with techs at T-mobile about this, they've entered a trouble ticket for engineering to look at. It seems to me like there's two things going on, and T-mobile hasn't addressed or tried to help in this regard.

1. It appears that my 8320 isn't always recognizing the t-mob network that's there. If I manually scan it will often find a t-mob and at&t network while my phone has no service and just says sos.

2. There's a significant lag in picking up a signal from one tower to another as I'm driving... Several minutes sometimes.

So I'm in a hard spot. I've got a couple of weeks to try out the t-mobile service and can cancel within that time and not be stuck in a contract. It's really important to me to have the UMA so I can reliably use my phone at home where nobody has a good cell network. If t-mob can improve the reception just a little, the trade off would be worth it compared to the slightly better at&t coverage I have now (except at home). However, if there was a way to boost the signal further on my at&t phone at my house I wouldn't need to rely on the UMA calling or the t-mobile service.

Any thoughts or tips for having decent coverage when living apparently to far from civilization for anybody to have a decent network?

If it matters, the at&t 8300 is running OS v4.2.2.89 and the t-mobile 8320 OS v4.2.2.180