It is not your phone
Every evening it is the same. You get through, you see your family for a minute, then the picture stops. The voice turns into pieces. You hang up and call again. It happens three more times.
In the morning the same phone, the same app and the same people work perfectly.
So the problem is almost never your phone, and it is usually not the app. It is the hour.
Everybody calls home at the same time
Think about who is around you. Forty people in one building, all finishing work within an hour of each other, all sitting down at the same time, all calling the same part of the world.
Two things get crowded at once.
The wifi in the building is one connection shared by everyone in it. When five people watch video on it, the rest get what is left.
The mobile network is also busiest in the evening, because this is when everyone uses it. A tower serving a farming area or an industrial zone was not built for four hundred people all making video calls at nine at night.
Try these, in this order
Start at the top. Most calls are fixed in the first three.
- Turn off wifi and use your mobile data instead. In a crowded building this alone fixes it more often than anything else
- Move next to a window, or step outside. Concrete and metal walls block signal badly, and dorm rooms and site buildings are full of both
- Turn your own video off and keep theirs on. You still see them, and the call uses far less
- Switch to a voice call. If you just want to talk, sound gets through when pictures cannot
- Close other apps that are updating or downloading in the background
- Ask the other side to do the same things. Half of all broken calls are the far end, not you
Wifi is not automatically better
Many people assume wifi is always the better choice. In a shared building at peak hour, it often is not.
Free wifi in a dorm, a hostel or a site office is usually one ordinary home connection asked to do the work of forty. Your own mobile data is yours alone.
Try both, on the same evening, and see which one holds. Then use that one at that hour. You may end up on wifi in the morning and on data at night, and that is the right answer, not a strange one.
On a farm or a moshav
Coverage in the Arava, the Negev and the northern farming areas is thinner than in the cities, and that is simply the truth.
- Learn where your good spot is. Almost every worker on a farm knows one place where calls hold. Find yours and use it
- Higher and more open is better. A doorway, a yard, a roof if it is safe
- A packing house or a greenhouse with a metal frame is one of the worst places to stand
- If the good spot is cold or dark, still go there. A five minute call that works beats twenty minutes of redialing
On a building site or in a basement
Underground parking, stairwells and the lower floors of a concrete frame block signal almost completely.
Go up, or go out. One floor up, or ten steps outside the entrance, is often the whole fix.
If it only breaks at their end
Sometimes the weak side is home, not Israel. You can tell by the pattern.
If they can hear you but you cannot hear them, if it only happens when they are in one room, or if it happens on every call no matter your hour, the problem is over there.
Ask them to try the same list: move near a window, turn their video off, use data instead of the house wifi.
What actually uses your data
Rough numbers, so you can plan.
- A voice call over the internet uses very little — you can talk for hours on a small amount
- A video call uses many times more, and a sharp picture uses more again
- Sending photos and short videos is small
- Watching video while you wait for someone to answer is the quiet one that empties a plan
Most apps have a setting to use less data. Turning it on lowers the picture a little and makes the call far more likely to survive a bad evening. It is usually a good trade.
When it is worth telling us
If your calls fail at the same place and the same hour every day, that is useful information, not a complaint. Tell us where you are and when it happens.
Coverage problems in worker housing and farming areas are real, and we would rather hear about them than have you assume nothing can be done. You can talk to us in your own language.
