Comment by shawnz
2 years ago
Is there any data on how often this occurs with other brands, or what the failure rate was (i.e. how many attempts to call 911 succeeded in that time?) Otherwise 20+ reports certainly sounds bad but I don't really have a perspective on how bad it is. It could very well be that 20 failures across a year is within the expected failure rate due to unavoidable transient network issues.
The author of the linked Reddit post was unable to find anything for other Android brands, and only three cases across ten years for iPhones.
And, it’s worth pointing out that the sales volumes of iPhones and just Samsungs (not counting any other brand) are many times that of Pixel, so if there was an issue even nearly as frequent with those phones it would definitely have been noticed by now.
Samsung has probably automated this testing given the number of SKUs they support, and they definitely have a lot more developers who are familiar with the cellular modems they use (Exynos and Snapdragon) to fix up edge cases unlike Google.
The Pixel 6 (Pro and non-Pro) is a great example of an improperly tuned LTE/5G NR modem. Cellular connectivity was unreliable as could be, and the random No Network issue seemed consistent across T-Mobile, Verizon and AT&T, meanwhile a Pixel 7 or any other phone is stable and able to call/use data when this is occuring.
If this were a Samsung phone, it is likely their internal engineering could have identified the Exynos modem issue and pushed a patch, but no one at Google was familiar with the modem they bought from Samsung and they certainly have little leverage over 'em to get issues like this resolved.
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