CellStudent said:


Roaming is so 2007, LOL. A meaningless term.

Modern Verizon phones and calling plans cannot Roam under normal conditions, they just refuse to use the Roaming Tower and flash No Service or E911 Only on the screen.

The only way to check would be to dial 911 and see what happened. That's not a very smart thing to do.

If what you say is true, Verizon is a useless service. It's one thing if he has a weak or diminished signal, but once he has none, his phone should find a roaming partner.

Is that the trade-off these days to be on "The Network?"

gloopey1 said:


If what you say is true, Verizon is a useless service. It's one thing if he has a weak or diminished signal, but once he has none, his phone should find a roaming partner.

Is that the trade-off these days to be on "The Network?"

Yes, kind of...

As of 2.5 years ago when I quit working at Verizon, they still had Extended Network partnerships that were "roamable" carriers that did not bill per minute roaming charges.

However, the handsets themselves are programmed to reject signals from non-partner towers (anywhere inside the USA) and just refuse to function on what once-would-have-been a pay per minute roaming tower. The handset will still dial 911 in these non-partner areas, but...
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Not quite... roaming off of partners networks is still alive and well; but it is barred in areas where home coverage overlaps. Verizon may not charge their customers when they are roaming off of a partner these days, but the partner is still charging Verizon (a small) per minute charge for you to use their network. With that being said, Verizon (this is the same with other carriers as well) do not want you to roam off of a partner, nor pay a roaming fee to another carrier when you are in an area where they provide home coverage; likewise the other carrier probably doesn't really want to lend a hand and help carry traffic in these overlapping areas either.

So why does this mean you can't jump to a roaming partner in a coverage hole within...
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Thanks for the explanation. I'm just surprized to find this out. I have Sprint and they allow roaming off other carriers within my home market. If I go into a building that Sprint cannot penetrate, I'm able to roam on another carrier...provided it is able to cut through.

That may change once IDEN shuts down and the 800 Mhz voice is up and running. For now, I'm rarely without coverage.

alternals said:
So why does this mean you can't jump to a roaming partner in a coverage hole within the home area?

Well, as of two years ago whne I was in level two tech support, a VZW phone would jump to a partnership tower in a "home" market, if the signal strength indicator actually dropped to "below" zero. The phone decides which SID it should connect to based off of the chatter traffic on the control tower, not the GPS reporting.

So, if you're in a VZW SID and move to an area where the VZW control channel is completely indistinguishable from the noise floor (signal strength much worse than -150 dBm) then the VZW phone will look for a partner tower, even if it's "geographically" inside a ...
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Agreed. The bean counters have been running the place at least since the Alltel 'merger' and likely even before then.