About this site

My name is Keith Calligan. I have always had a fascination with various forms of technology. Some may call it a little obsessive. For the past 30 years or so, the obsession has been computers, the Internet, Amateur (HAM) radio, and telecommunications networks (pagers and cell phones), and now blogging about some of these things.

Back in the late 90s, I sold cell phones at Radio Shack. At that time, the providers that were around in my area of the country (Baltimore, MD) were Bell Atlantic, Sprint Spectrum, and Cellular One. We were at the turning point between AMPS networks (analog), and the first form of 2G (GSM and TDMA) networks in the United States. I did some forms of drive testing the cellular networks around 2002-2003 as well (mostly with Sprint CDMA towers).

I even had a pager website that I wrote around that time comparing the various paging providers called wirelessbuyer.com (now defunct). WirelessWeek magazine wrote an article about my site at that time (will need to see if I can find some references to it somewhere). Cellphonefaqs.com was another site of mine that asked users to rate their cellphone providers.

5G networks are the next big technology for cellular phone providers. All 3 of the U.S. providers have deployed 5G in one form or another. Verizon and AT&T use dynamic-spectrum sharing (DSS) which can dynamically allocate existing bandwidth towards either LTE or 5G based on current demand. T-Mobile currently has more bandwidth (frequency spectrum) available partly due to their acquisition of Sprint. The Sprint acquisition helped with the mid-band and with being able to aggregate signals better from various bands.

T-Mobile has a little bit of a lead in 5G availability but this should all change based on the Verizon and AT&T acquiring mid-band spectrum as a result of the C-Band auctions. This spectrum will become available later in the year (2021).

My plan with this site is to use the tools at my disposal (which I will explain below) to drive test the 3 cellular networks (mostly in the Philadelphia, PA area). I would consider myself in the beginning-to-intermediate stage in regards to using these tools. My plan (as I learn more) is to consolidate these tools to find the ones that are most relevant. As part of this, I want to find a concise list of metrics and tests that that I can log over time to compare the 3 cellular networks (in terms of speed, reliability, availability, etc) and see how performance (hopefully) improves with the addition of the the additional bandwidth.

Blog posts will follow that will describe any new terms, news/views, and tests that I am doing.

For now, here is the list of hardware (phones) and apps that I am using. Some of this will be consolidated in the future.

My setup is as follows:

OnePlus 8T (dual-sim) on Verizon Prepaid and ATT Elite plan (postpaid)
Samsung A51-5G on Google FI (T-Mobile)

I also have an Iphone 12 as my primary phone that is on ATT but don’t do much with that besides speed-testing and field-test mode.

The apps I use on my Android-based phones are as follows:

Cellmapper (find this very useful for crowd-sourced data)
NetMonster
Network Cell Info
NetMonitor
Net Monitor (there are 2 apps with similar names)
NPerf
Pingify (constant ping helps see if there are any drops in network)
RantCell (paid)
G-NetTrack Pro
G-Mon Pro
Speedtester