I am yet another very disguntled vodafone business customer. I hope by making this post, some of the testing I have been asked to undertake may throw some light on this issue and expedite a fix.
Firstly, my grievance:
I had an unrelated problem with an HTC Desire S locking up and rebooting. We have also had some issues with a SureSignal (SS) at work, whilst my SS at home works flawlessly. After several letters of formal complaint, Vodafone elected to offer me a new handset, that of an HTC One S and a new SS.
Since having the One S I have issues with dropped calls with my SS both at work and at home. Both locations have very poor vodafone coverage indicating 1-2 bars on the phone. Without the SS, calls can sometimes be made, but are often cut off.
I have had this issue for over 3 weeks and worked with vodafone initially focussing on a the problem being with the SS. I was horrified to find on the forum that the issues are well known to Vodafone, so the last 3 weeks of troubleshooting have been a complete waste of mine, and Vodafone staff's time.
I endorse previous posts of people who have had the same experience. It is clear that both VF sales and most technical staff do not know this issue and continue to sell the HTC One series with people using a SS. It is very dissapointing that VF technical staff could not have found this out, like I did, by doing an internet search.
Testing
Following on from extensive testing using two SS's at two locations, the issues seem to be the phone's selection of GSM or 3G. The SS only works on 3G and when using the SS when there is no GSM signal the phone works fine. However, it would seem that as soon as the phone detects a GSM signal it moves the call across to GSM in preference regardless of any difference in signal strength. We have managed to demonstrate this by putting the phone and suresignal in a metallic container. It works fine. As the phone is withdrawn from the container the RHS right on the SS goes off and the call continues, but with signal strength falling to 1-2 bars. We have tried with the phone set to GSM only, GSM+3G and 3G only. This proved the hypothesis above.
Note that once the call has been transfered to the local GSM mast, the SS does not have the functionality to transfer a call dynamically from an existing GSM call to the SS, so the call must be initiated through the SS.
Apart from the calls being regularly dropped, another consequence is finding voicemail messages with no missed calls despite being 3m from the SS.
Setting the phone to 3G only provides a workaround, but then the user has to remember to change the settings in the phone to GSM/3G to make the phone work elsewhere.
The conclusions we reached with Vodafone technical services is that the issue lies within the phone. The way in which the software chooses between 3G and GSM. Whether this is specifically confined to the implementation of VF's sure signal is unknown. Speculation is that this is because of the specific environment of a SS: the SS provides a locallised 3G signal but no GSM, whereas public VF masts will typically overlay a 3G signal on the same mast as GSM making similar signal strengths.
As a final point, this has been a known issue since April 2012. Why therefore over 6 months later is this not resolved? Are VF making any efforts to apply pressure to HTC to either fix this issue or rebuff it as a SS problem?
