What's with the data connectivity dropouts?
 

I found this to be a huge problem in both Shanghai and Beijing (although worse in Beijing than Shanghai) on China Unicom. When driving along the 4th ring road, for example, data connectivity would drop every 1-2 km, even when the phone showed a full signal.

One of my friends said it's just because China Unicom sucks; he uses China Mobile. Another said it's because they give higher priority to locals' SIM cards than to SIM cards issued to foreigners, because locals are more likely to complain than foreigners. Yet another of my friends said it's because there aren't many people out by the 4th ring road (yeah right, it's still more populated than the Sunset District in San Francisco, and in any case I can drive down Interstate 280 without data connectivity to AT&T's network dropping every mile and that terrain is far more challenging to cover). Or does it have something to do with the fact that locals pay only ¥20 per GB and they literally cannot afford to put up decent infrastructure with the revenue they're getting?

It's maddening, especially when the data connection dropping means that the VPN has to reconnect all over again when the connection is reestablished. I've never had a VoIP call drop so many times over the course of just 5 miles of road.

This has been an issue as long as I can remember in China. In short the connectivitity of both Mobile and Unicom is not that good. Along with creepingly slow internet speeds this is just something that those of us who live in China have learned to live with.

It seems like he was mainly complaining about missed handoffs while driving along 4th Ring in Bj. Maybe I too am conditioned to this stuff, but the idea of trying to make a VoIP in that situation strikes me as crazy...though not as crazy as doing the same on a train that's traveling 300 kph (something I have actually witnessed myself, believe it or not).

Regarding Mobile v Unicom and other theories introduced by the OP, IME Mobile is slightly better on the whole (especially in elevators and parking garages), but Unicom blows them away in many cities. The networks are what they are, and in spite of minor annoyances, are pretty impressive on the whole.

Err..."missed handoff" is not the right term. I can make or receive a regular voice call, without dropouts, and keep driving along the 4th ring for miles without a problem. But data service sucks big time. It's not just VoIP that has problems, but apps like Glympse (which allow my friends to track my location) have problems as well because they usually update every 3-5 seconds, and there are gaps in the data.

But now that I think about it, I've also seen data dropouts when standing perfectly still. For example, while eating lunch or dinner at a restaurant (one of which was 羲和雅苑, yes right in the middle of Beijing's 中关村 district). That's like not being able to provide service to the center of Silicon Valley when I'm sitting still with full signal. I was also getting data dropouts while walking on the trails in 中山公园.

Your friends can track your location every 3-5 seconds! Your life is different from mine.

Only when I want them to. https://www.glympse.com/

Assuming your goal is to meet up with your friends, why not simply use wechat location sharing? I've never experienced any problems with it, whether on the move or stationary.

It's not. My goal is to make VoIP calls, share my location with friends (some of whom don't use wechat), and just browse web pages. All of which is difficult to do when the data connection keeps dropping.

I actually did have problems with wechat location sharing when a friend tried to share his location with me. I had set VPN.ac, which I was using that day, to allow wechat to bypass the VPN, figuring that since it is a Chinese app, it shouldn't need to use the VPN. But it was trying to pull data from Google Maps, so it didn't show anything except two dots on a blank background (until I switched the VPN on for wechat too).

Why didn't you make baidu your default map? (I have the same phone with you, and stick with google maps, but if location information was super important to me, I'd make the switch.)

Taking a step back, I must opine that the general tone of your posts suggests that you have a chip on your shoulder with respect to telephony in China. I happen to agree with you that the system could be (much) better. That having been said, expecting it to be something it's not is kind of silly IMO.

On your next visit to China, I advise you to get a SIM that permits you to make old school phone calls.

There's literally no option to do that in the WeChat app (believe me, I looked). A quick internet search shows that the only way to do this is to switch the entire language of your phone to simplified Chinese :rolleyes:. So I guess the people who wrote the app never realized that it's possible to want to use a specific language and a specific mapping service independently.

Sorry if I sound a bit peeved, but...I am a little bit peeved. First of all, I bought a SIM card at mychinaunicom.com, which I later found out was way overpriced (imagine my surprise when my friend told me that he pays only ¥20/GB). And actually I found a SIM card from my previous visit to China (bought in China at my hotel) and looked at the pricing, and it's true. ¥30/500MB, ¥50/1GB, and ¥100/2.5GB was the pricing from 2 years ago. Even with the roughly 50% markup the guy at the hotel sold it to me for, it was still cheaper than the card I bought this time. Second, the last time I was in China (1.5 to 2 years ago), these dropouts either did not occur, did not occur as often, or I do not remember them happening. It seems like the problem has gotten worse. Now if I were paying ¥20/GB, I'd probably be willing to overlook some of these problems, but I was paying a lot more than that. When I pay US$25 for 1GB of data, I expect the service to be fairly decent, especially in the middle of two of China's biggest cities, and what I got was anything but. This also happened with the Unicom HK card I had; the data connection would drop occasionally. A few times, my phone's modem even sort of "locked up" and refused to connect to the data network until I put it in airplane mode and took it out of airplane mode. I've had this happen in the US a handful of times, maybe once every 2-3 months. In China it was happening every 1-2 days. Third, they've made it an even bigger pain to obtain a SIM than it was on my previous visit. There are rumors flying about having to cancel 4G plans before you leave China or you get blacklisted (not sure if that's true or not). But LvyCom, an authorized distributor, has something about this on their main website: http://www.lvycom.com/ It says SIM cards from other providers and obtained from other China Unicom sources like official stores "Require tedious cancellation process; fail to cancel will cause bad credit and debt." This is the first time I've seen any authorized distributor chime in on this rumor.

Now if I were a conspiracy theorist, I'd probably assume that the service is poor and:

• They did it because voice is their cash cow, and they want VoIP calls to drop so often that people actually subscribe to the voice service.
• They did it because they want to make peoples' VPNs constantly have to disconnenct and reconnect so that the VPN ends up using up a high % of all data used establishing and reestablishing the connection, which increases their revenue.

I don't really think there's any conspiracy theory here. I just think their maintenance department doesn't know what they're doing, nor does their billing department. They oversold the network and the WCDMA cells are suffering from the "cell breathing" effect especially during the peak hours. Normally this would push traffic from a more heavily loaded cell to a more lightly loaded one; if all cells are heavily loaded, the coverage area can actually shrink and traffic literally gets dropped.

So yeah, I'm a bit peeved. But I'm pretty sure I'll have calmed down before my next visit :)

I'm nearly certain that we told you that SIM was overpriced before you bought it. The China Mobile cross border SIM is currently a better product, and data only costs ~HK$30/G if you get on a plan (need HKID or cash deposit). But, if you fall off of LTE, and don't have a phone that supports other protocols, you're relegated to Edge.:(

Regarding buying SIMs on the street, the new laws have certainly limited the playing field, but the very closest 小卖铺 to me still sells pre-registered Mobile and Unicom SIMs (much higher prices than a year ago, though, and the SIMs usually aren't Shanghai numbers).

Yeah, but I was still shocked by how overpriced the card was. I mean, I expected that it was maybe 1.5x to 2x overpriced. The shocker was that it was more like 7-9x overpriced :D

Hopefully this situation with China Mobile gets better in the near future. Google's already given notice that my Nexus 5 won't be getting the Android N update, and security updates will stop sometime around September-October this year (3 years after initial availability or 18 months after it was last sold at the Play Store)...meaning, I'll likely be buying the upcoming Nexus device rumored to be manufactured by HTC. I hope that they were able to put TD-SCDMA into North American model (or they just release one model instead of two).

Yeah, but you guys also warned me that those types of places only sell cards to tourists who don't look Chinese, due to recent sting operations that always involve people who look Chinese. And my problem is that I look way too Chinese. I mean, when people try to talk to me, I find myself having to constantly say things like "我不懂中文". Another amusing story is that at Shanghai Disneyland, at the fastpass kiosk, there is a touch screen where you select either "中文" or "English", then you select the ride you want a fastpass for. There was a Cast Member standing next to the machine to assist guests who might be unfamiliar with the machine. Well I walked up and pressed "English" because I have no idea how to write the name of the ride I wanted to go on in Chinese; the Cast Member then pressed the "中文" button, I'm assuming to try to be helpful. Sigh. I'd be willing to bet 200 to 1 payout odds that this doesn't happen if I look Caucasian, black, Indian, etc.

To be quite honest, that was me, not moondog, who told you about that. And I only figured out when I had to go buy SIM cards for other people, and no one would sell me pre-registered ones despite moondog insisting that they knew people would, until I got the people I was buying for to come with me.

I'd go the 4G Pro route with cash deposit if it was possible to go month to month, but it looks like they want you to sign up to a 12-month term at a time when I'm only there for school holidays. Anything less and they seem to want you to go prepaid, which is a much costlier HK$300/4GB after the initial HK$150/1.5GB. That and I've had my mainland China Mobile number for 10 years now, and I'd rather not ditch it.

I was jogging along the 4th ring road from the airport expressway exit to Chaoyang park and was trying to hold a phone convo at the same time. The call dropped 3 times in 10 minutes. The person I was talking to was in the middle of Jing'an. I told them that it was to be expected as I was in the middle of the capital and they were in the middle of China's largest city, we wouldn't expect to have good connectivity :p. We both use Unicom.

Yikes. That's something that never happened to me. At least voice calls continued uninterrupted.

I wonder what % of Unicom's customers are postpaid customers, and how many of them are in contracts? Because I smell a class action lawsuit coming if a lot of those customers aren't free to leave. Remember when Cingular Wireless oversold service in California and was hit with a $18.5 million penalty? http://www.howardforums.com/showthre...r-Call-Quality

But my understanding of the Chinese mobile phone market is that most customers are prepaid, no contract.

They seriously need to raise data prices for everyone to the same levels that I paid through mychinaunicom.com, until they can complete network upgrades that allow people to use more data without experiencing crappy quality of service. People are probably running torrents off of their phones (so would I if I were paying only ¥20/GB).