Roaming in VZW territory?

[CrackedLCD]

I was at my local supermarket this afternoon, and Verizon's signal has always been terrible there. They don't have a tower anywhere nearby, and the store is next to a small but busy airport so the ability to add more cell towers is somewhat limited. The few that exist are barely over the tree lines.

So with Verizon, I normally drop to just 1x from LTE when I'm deep in the store.

Today, I pulled my phone out and was going to get on the store's free wifi to check something when I noticed that I had a full five bars of 3G signal. Wha?

When I opened the notification bar, there was the roaming triangle notice!

To investigate, I pulled up Signal Check, which gives signal strengths and cell site IDs (it's made for Sprint phones but does OK with Verizon) and lo, it said I was on EV DO Rev. A, on C SPIRE's network. Verizon 3G always comes up as eHRPD (or as I call it, e-Herp-Derp.) It was registering a very strong -60 dBm.

In the year-plus I've had Verizon, I've never seen the roaming triangle in any Verizon-served territory, and certainly not in this store. So my question is, is this something new? Or could it be a temporary thing they're doing since we're in the middle of a three day concert series just down the road at the beach

 

[PhilosoRaptor]

No, it's nothing new and there's definitely areas where you'll roam on Verizon. I know because I live and work in an "extended service" area and I see the roaming icon/notification all the time because of it (or I would if I wasn't rooted and running an Xposed module to block the icon/notificaiton). I'm in Kentucky, where one of the major carriers is Bluegrass Cellular and Verizon has a roaming agreement with them, so I get all my cell/data services (1x, 3G and even LTE) through their towers instead of Verizon.

There's no need to worry about it though. There are no roaming charges on Verizon while in the US. I have used 3-5GBs a month on average (on unlimited data plan) while roaming since I've lived here for the past few years.

 

[tylerw1285]

their towers? You mean their spectrum on the same exact tower lol? Utilization on the frequency could cause that. Sir if you have just recently been getting 3g and or 1x it is because Verizon is in the middle of the XTLE upgrade. They are having to switch customers over to a working server/central office which causes terrible service in order to get the new fiber up the tower. they are making the internet with Verizon 2 signals instead of 1 and giving voice their own at a very low freq. which means it will travel long away from any tower before losing signal. Kansas City just got XltE today and my d/l is 75 and upload 20.

 

[CrackedLCD]

It's been a while, but I got put on roaming again at that same store. So this is definitely not related to XLTE, which has already rolled out here (and resulted in lower LTE speeds for me, sadly.)

This time, I was only on C Spire's 3G for a hot second before it dropped down to 1X. I couldn't make any phone calls or use any data on their 1X (which is more or less the same kind of service I had from them when I was a subscriber, lol.)

Here's a shot of the tower info:

The address puts the tower directly across the street from the supermarket, which explains the great signal strength. I got as high as -52 dBm in the parking lot.

I don't mind the roaming since it costs nothing, but I just wish it had worked. Unlike my last experience, this time my phone stayed with C Spire and its dead 1X service for a mile or two up the road, so I couldn't use any apps or nav because it said there was no connection.