New 3G cell service is here: Reception is spotty in Baudette but Tbaytel says 3G is still a work in progress

Staff

The towers were turned on about two weeks ago, but it wasn’t until last Tuesday that customers could start getting 3G cell phones in the Rainy River District.
“Tuesday (March 8, 2011) was the soft launch of 3G,” explained Rainy River cell phone dealer Lance Lindal of Atwood Enterprises/Sears.
The day before that he had to travel to Fort Frances where he and other area dealers were trained on the new phones and briefed on plans for it. “Rainy River and Fort Frances have 3G now and they (Tbaytel) told us they hope to fill in all the inbetween sites in this area (Fort to RR to Morson) by fishing opener and between Fort and Thunder Bay by August.”
Lindal brought his first shipment of 3G phones back from Fort on Tuesday and by Thursday he was nearly out of them. He hoped to get more phones by Friday as word of the new system is spreading fast.
3G HSPA is short for “3rd Generation High Speed Packet Access. It is much faster than Tbaytel’s previous system, 1X which still exists and will be maintained for a period of time. 3G offers data speeds up to 21 Megabits per second versus speeds up to 3 Mbps on the 1X.
Tbaytel has the official announcement of the new service slated for later this month.
As for the performance of the new phones, “I noticed a big difference in the download speeds,” said the first 3G customer in Rainy River, Ken Johnston. “It is like lightning fast and there are new features like MMS available!”
Johnston said that he did run into one snag with the new phones. “I had trouble with it working in Baudette. It could not find Tbaytel’s network and wanted to roam off American ones.” When he called Tbaytel to complain he was at first told they had to look into it but they later called back with technical information telling him that the work is not complete on the 3G system.
The 1X phones allowed customers to set their Blackberry phones to “Home Only.” The new ones do not have that setting. Tbaytel’s customer service said that the new phones automatically seek the strongest signal. Johnston said he thought it was ridiculous that when he drove 20 miles east he could get a signal but 1 mile west he could not. “However, I am pleased that they say they are still working on the system and that the problem is noted. So many people from here need their phones to work that close to the tower. Think of hockey families. They drop their kids off at the arena in Baudette and have them call home on their cell when they need to be picked up. Imagine if they had to pay roaming and long distance a mile from the tower!”
Johnston said that he had good signal on Saturday in Baudette, but every once in a while it would drop right off and try to connect to US providers. If a person is not aware that their phone has switched to a US provider they may incur roaming charges for both phone and data services.
Carla Wiersema, a native of Rainy River, works for Tbaytel, and said Monday that they encourage people to call in any difficulties they are having with their service. Cell customers can do so by dialing 611 on their phone.