The city I live in, Port Macquarie, has awful cell phone reception basically everywhere (I’m on the Vodafone network).
Is this something I can bring up with the local council, or elected representative?
I can’t believe I live in a city of 50,000 people and I’m unable to receive phone calls from my house.
Nope. But there would be a difference in components in cheap versus expensive, perhaps even how the aerial is situated inside phone?
A guy I worked with had an iphone 4 on the same provider as me and sometimes he would get reception where we were provided a satellite phone in a deep valley. That phone was an absolute beast, we still talk about it 7 years later as it got us out of trouble a few times. Our job keeps us outside of mobile reception and there is a difference between each phone on site even when they are all running Telstra or resellers. The Optus and Vodaphone people suffer more than us.
There are absolutely differences in signal quality in phones, but nobody ever mentions it because the equipment needed to properly test it is extremely costly and technical.
It’s one of the things the LTT Labs are trying to set up to do. RF shielded test generator and a spectrum analyzer and generator… The spectrum analyzer by itself costs upwards of $100k USD.
So hopefully, eventually, you’ll be able to see signal quality metrics from at least one place.