3G & 4G not supported?

[Ueland]

I have had issues with never getting neighboring cells up, but those appeared as soon as I switched to 2G. Suddenly even the "cell information" page worked.

I did not notice the 2G requirement before I casually noticed it in a ticket. Did I miss something? If not, and it is true that it work for only 2G, then it should be stated more places, like the app and the readme.

And if so, what needs to be done for getting 3/4G support?

I will keep my phone in 2G mode today when in my known surveillance area for testing.

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[E3V3A]

This is a well known Android bug, that are most annoyingly present on most Samsung phones.
The RF-Signal Tracker site states this:

Neighbor information has always been problematic in Android. You can get 2G cell IDs, but not 3G or 4G. And the list of potential neighbors gets populated briefly just before the cell hands off. Well, it hit me one day, why not just collect -- continuously -- handoff statistics? You always know the current (serving) cell, you see who it hands off to...well, that is a neighbor relation!

So I decided to just collect, in the background, neighbor data...that is, what cell handed off to what cell. It's not perfect -- it only shows neighbor relationships the device has encountered -- but it's better than nothing which is what I have now. This is much like the coverage bubbles the app draws -- they are not necessarily the complete coverages, but the coverage areas seen by the device.

Those are indeed good suggestions.

Then the G-NetTrack app site has collected compatibility info on a huge number of devices and if they handle neighboring cells. So check if your device is on this list.

We have already an issue assigned (#100) to this, but should probably give this a higher priority.

[SecUpwN]

To be honest, this surpises me, @E3V3A. Even I didn't notice since everything seems to work flawlessly on my HTC One. So is this essentially a separate bug or a dupe of #100? Let me know please.

[E3V3A]

It's both! Same because of no NC's, but different because of the device dependent 2G requirement.

[Ueland]

That page says that some N5-devices work while others dont, so i suspect that it is correct. I like your suggestion for the poor-mans method for getting this info. Perhaps we should simply go for that? (You know, make it work now, then make it better in the future(tm)"

[E3V3A]

Yes, let's use the hand-off data to build a NC list, on those devices that doesn't provide it by API or other methods. We still didn't check what/if the getAllCellInfo() improves things. It was introduced in the code, but it's unclear what it actually returns... Can someone check? Build PoC app that only displays that info? Here's what MozStumbler devs have to say about this.

[E3V3A]

One user at Samsung says this:

After doing some testing with various devices, it appears getAllCellInfo only works with certain CDMA/LTE devices, which I suspect is a result of a more stock Qualcomm RIL being used on those devices.

This is also interesting...

[ehem]

What is the official position now? Is 3G/4G supported with all hardware? Is 3G/4G supported with some hardware? Do devices with 3G/4G support completely break AIMSICD?

I'm currently trying to make sense of why AIMSICD is giving me the yellow icon. Could be I'm slightly away from the better mapped out cells, thus the nearer ones aren't yet in OpenCellID's DB. I got some slightly different data from turning off 3G/4G support, but it still gives the yellow icon.

[DJaeger]

@He3556: I don't think this is clarified!

[He3556]

Basically, we only need to track the GSM connections right now in this project.
3G/4G tracking is nice to have - but important to implement sometimes later.
The easiest way to get a proper detection (right now) is to deactivate 3G/4G.
It would help us to focus on the basic functions of our App.
Btw. I am just trying to get this project lightweight so we are not affected by all the bugs that are waiting for us and preventing the project to reach any goals.

Sorry if i have to close some more issues that are not solved right now - we can open them again later...

[DJaeger]

If it is really the case, that it could be, that the app doesn't work, we should do one of the following in favor of closing this issue:

1. Warn the user about this behaviour either on
   a. every device
   b. not compatible devices determined by a list of compatible devices
2. solve this incompatibillity

[DJaeger]

The preferable option should be 2.
But if we choose 1. at least for now, we chould choose 1.b. which could be done within #269.

[DJaeger]

If we want to do it within #269, please add this one there!

[He3556]

It's not really about the compatibility of the devices if we just ignore 3G/4G in our App.

But this would be a great thing to have: "not compatible devices determined by a list of compatible devices"

who can get this informations together?
We would also need a column for "NCL" and "changing LAC" - so we know if the detections should be working on the devices.

[DJaeger]

So the simplest way to solve this issue is to ignore 3G/4G ?
And if we do this, we doesn't have to take care of which device is used?

[DJaeger]

Please add what is device depentant and needs to be checked to the issue 269 already mentioned above and not here.
Thanks.

[SecUpwN]

I am re-opening this discussion due to its importance and unclear solution. Thanks for understanding!