• After 15+ years, we've made a big change: Android Forums is now Early Bird Club. Learn more here.

Trouble with 3G

J

jkenn24

Newbie
I got this phone for 20 during the black friday deal. And overall I think the phone is pretty nice. However, I am getting terrible 3G speeds. I found an app that shows you your CDMA information and found that this phone is trying to connect to a tower that is 3,000 miles away. I ran the same app on my Wife's Optimus Slider and her tower is half a mile away. I never experience speeds this terrible with my Optimus V. Anyone have any suggestions? Virgin Mobile support has been no help so far.

Not sure if this helps?
PRL on ZTE AWE 32030
PRL on Optiums Slider 61007
 
I'm in the same situation as you. Bought 2 on BF. Both phones are incredibly slow on 3G. Data crawls compared to my previous phone which is also an Optimus Slider. I'm almost to the point of going back to the Optimus Slider but I'm hoping this can be fixed somehow as it is a nice phone. What app did you use for your tower test? If it's trying to connect to a far away tower maybe this can be fixed via firmware??
 
No cellphone (except maybe one located on the ISS) can connect to a tower that's 3,000 (or 300) miles away. If could be a bad PRL. Bring it into the store and have them check it out.
 
I am using an app called droidRFtool CDMA. It displays all the signal information as well as the coordinates of the tower your connecting to. the funny thing is, if you enter in the coordinates for this tower it can't be located. If I turn my GPS on it shows my coordinates and lists a distance away from the tower which is over 3,000 miles.
 
Virgin Mobile is totally clueless on this. They keep telling me to go into Airplane mode or going in and turning Data on and off and then see if anything changes. Stuff I have tried about a 100 times now. lol
 
Go in on Monday and ask them "Don't you have a direct number to your tech people? Or one to the office of the CEO of your company?" Because if you don't. Mary (or whatever her nametag reads), I'll look it up and mention your name to Rich Branson in the conversation. (If they don't know who signs their pay checks, they shouldn't be working there.)

Then I'd send a nicely-worded, very calm letter to Branson's office at Virgin, detailing all the trips and phone calls you made, and the fact that the staff at the local store seems to know as much about cellphones as Mr. Branson knows about your shirt size - nothing.

You'd be amazed at the action that occurs when a store receives a phone call from the personal assitant to the CEO of the company. (My wife's laptop, ruined by following the directions given to her by "tech support", wasn't repaired, it was replaced by a much nicer and newer model - with an apology for her troubles.) About 10 years ago I worked for a company that had signs in the cafeteria. I'm quoting one of them from memory. "It takes months to gain a customer, but moments to lose a lot of them." Most large corporations are aware of that.
 
Rukbat said:
Then I'd send a nicely-worded, very calm letter to Branson's office at Virgin, detailing all the trips and phone calls you made, and the fact that the staff at the local store seems to know as much about cellphones as Mr. Branson knows about your shirt size - nothing.
Click to expand...

Sprint owns virgin mobile usa, they just pay royalties to Branson's company for the name.
 
well its now been almost a month and a half and I have now been through 3 ZTE AWE phones. I have tried every troubleshooting step I can think of and the phone will not connect EVDO and only 1x. It will not achieve a download speed of over 0.14 MB/s. I don't know what else to do.

Any ideas?
 
jkenn24 said:
well its now been almost a month and a half and I have now been through 3 ZTE AWE phones. I have tried every troubleshooting step I can think of and the phone will not connect EVDO and only 1x. It will not achieve a download speed of over 0.14 MB/s. I don't know what else to do.

Any ideas?
Click to expand...


If you have been through 3 phones, it's not a phone problem, it's an account provisioning problem. For some reason your account isn't provisioned correctly for the Awe, and that's why the data is awful.

It seems very hit-or-miss whether you'll be able to get an account rep on the phone who will reprovisioning your account. You can try emailing the Social Media Team (saveme@thevirginangels.com) and see if they can help. Alternately, if you're not too attached to your number, you can create a new account for the Awe and leave the problems of your current account behind you.

My daughter's Awe regularly sees 2+ Mbps speeds, so it's definitely not a flaw inherent in the phone model. Good luck getting yours to perform as it should!
 
I rarely see speeds above 0.4 Mbps on mine when I have full bars, which honestly isn't useable for anything IMO. I've called many times and they have been of no help. Maybe I am just spoiled with my 70 Mbps down at home. IDEK.

Getting VPNs to work on this thing was a challenge as well, the stupid RTSP and HTTPPD proxy that is set blocks a bunch of protocols.
 
jkenn24 said:
well its now been almost a month and a half and I have now been through 3 ZTE AWE phones. I have tried every troubleshooting step I can think of and the phone will not connect EVDO and only 1x. It will not achieve a download speed of over 0.14 MB/s. I don't know what else to do.

Any ideas?
Click to expand...

Has anyone had success in fixing this issue? I need to get to the bottom of this.
 
my issue was never rectified by virgin mobile. They are totally clueless and have tried doing every troubleshooting step possible. Then they say please allow us 3 business days for our engineers to investigate the issue. I never did hear back from anyone I got fed up and the phone is now sitting in my drawer and I went back to my LG Optimus V. Its a shame, its a nice phone, but the 3G is not usable. I only paid 20 for the phone back on black friday so I not extremely upset, but i have started looking at the Galaxy Ring and Optimus F3
 
I've been told it's because of upgrades being performed in my area, and they have no estimate on when these upgrades will be completed.

The funny thing is, 10 miles down the road I get a good 3G connection, but it's on EVDO Rev A. But in most of the east SF Bay Area, I see the phone try to connect to EVDO Rev B and then fail to 1xRTT.

I still think it's a flaw in the phone itself. I also submitted a question to ZTE to see if they had anything to offer, but of course, they just thanked me for my report and promised to forward it to their engineers.

I wish I knew if there was a way to turn off Rev B to see if that would fix anything.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom