Why is service so bad in tall buildings?
Most people experience very poor service when using phones in tall buildings (like apartments and office towers). There usually isn’t too much of an issue below the 10th floor, but above that elevation it is rare that you will get decent service on any provider. The problem is different for CDMA phones and for TDMA/GSM/iDEN phones, but the end result is identical. Let’s start with TDMA/GSM/iDEN phones and see why being up high is such a problem. All of these technologies work on the principle of channel reuse, which means that any given channel is reused as frequently as possible throughout a geographic area. However, the closer these sites of the same channel are, the greater the chance that interference will occur. We call this co-channel interference because the problem comes from an unwanted signal on the same channel. Network engineers are very cognizant of co-channel problems, and so they tune their networks so that sites working on the same sets of channels don’t carry far enoug
