My calls drop out at home

The six causes, and how to tell them apart

1. Coverage on the edge. The call sets up with barely enough and drops as soon as anything changes: you move, a car passes, somebody stands up. You recognise it because it cuts at any moment with no pattern, and because your battery drains too. It is the commonest cause, and the one a booster fixes.
2. The hop between masts. If your house sits right on the boundary between two masts, the phone jumps from one to the other mid-conversation and sometimes does not make it. You recognise it because it cuts at roughly the same minute, or at the same point in the house, every time.
3. The handover from WiFi to the mobile network. If you have WiFi Calling on and you step into the garden, the phone has to hand the call from the router to the mobile network, and if there is no mobile coverage outside, it drops. You recognise it because it cuts ALWAYS as you cross the doorway. A booster does not fix this by being a booster: it is fixed by actually having mobile coverage, which is exactly what we install.
4. A saturated network. Summer, fiestas, a full beach. You recognise it because it happens at particular hours in particular months, and to the whole neighbourhood at once.
5. The handset. Uncommon, but real: an old phone without the bands your operator uses today, or an old SIM with dirty contacts. Rule it out by putting your SIM in another phone for a day.
6. 4G calling switched off on your handset (VoLTE). This is the one almost nobody checks, and it has stopped being rare. Without VoLTE, the moment you dial, the phone steps off 4G to go looking for 3G or 2G: Orange says so on its own help page, 'Sin VoLTE, al hacer una llamada el móvil usa automáticamente las redes 3G o 2G'. If 4G barely reaches your house and 3G hardly reaches it at all, the call is born dead or drops after a few seconds. One detail gives it away every time: data works, WhatsApp works, and an ordinary call does not. It is free to fix, you switch it on in the settings.

The test that separates the first three

For one week, every time a call drops, note three things: where you were, how long you had been talking, and whether you were still or walking. Seven notes and the pattern shows itself:

• If it cuts anywhere and at any minute → coverage on the edge.
• If it cuts always at the same point in the house or garden → the hop between masts, or the edge of your WiFi.
• If it cuts always just as you walk out of the door → it is the WiFi-to-mobile handover.
• If it only cuts on August afternoons → it is the network, and it is not your doing.
• If data and WhatsApp are fine and the only thing that fails is the call → check first whether VoLTE is switched on, which costs nothing.

If the answer points to WiFi Calling, the full explanation of how it works and where its limits are is in WiFi Calling, and the honest comparison with what we do is in WiFi Calling or a signal booster.