Reception problems in Copenhage, Denmark?

[wisniak]

Hi,

I have a friend who travels quite a bit to Copenhagen.

He frequently says that he has severe reception problems there - his phone does not have any reception, or very limited.

He usually is in a large office of a global company.

This has happened with a variety of quad-band phones, such as a Nokia E71, Nokia N95 and lately with a Blackberry.

Has anyone experienced these problems?

nb. He has traveled with the same phones to other cities (eg London, Vienna, etc) with no problems at all.


Thank you.

[inquisitor]

In Denmark they use GSM900/1800 and UMTS2100 like in most other countries. I guess your friend's provider has only one roaming partner in Denmark with inferior coverage or his SIM is being refused by one or more roaming networks due to technical problems.

I had such a problem in Sweden with the Tele2 Comviq network last year, when my German simyo SIM card was sporadically refused when trying to register and sometimes handovers failed while moving form cell to cell. Also data connections failed from time to time, allthough they worked seconds earlier.
That can happen when communication between the VLR of the roaming network and the HLR of the home network or one of these instances is faulty.

But also keep in mind that attenuation is quite high when you are surrounded by concrete walls (especially if reinforced by steel) and coated windows, which may be the case for an office building.

[wisniak]

I'll refer him to his local cell provider to check that.

[edit]
Hmmm..

His cell provider has roaming agreements with the following:
Hi3G Denmark - 3 DK
TDC A/S - TDC Mobil
Telenor A/S DK - SONOFON, SONO,Telenor DK
Telia Danmark - TELIA DK

So I don't think that's the problem.
I'll ask him about the office itself, though.

[inquisitor]

Maybe he was roaming on the "3" network, which has the worst indoor coverage as they are on UMTS2100 only (the higher the frequency the worse the signal range and penetration). But when he was out of coverage his phone should have registered on another network.
Tell him to select a network manually the next time he experiences bad coverage.

The Scandinavian countries are probably one of the most advanced ones when it comes to mobile communications. Whatever the problem is, it's not caused by network quality in Denmark in general.

[wisniak]

Thank you again.