Nextivity – Blog – Why Can’t I Get a Cell Signal Indoors?

It’s an everyday annoyance: you go from having perfectly functional reception, chatting away on a nice walk, only to find your call losing audio quality or even dropping entirely once you go indoors. Why does this happen?

There are many possible factors that can make it difficult to get a signal inside a specific space, like a house, office, or storefront. These factors can generally be categorized into three areas of focus, distance from the cell tower, exterior obstructions, and interior obstructions. Distance from the cell tower is the easiest to understand of the three. Cell towers are structures that mobile service providers use to connect you to their mobile network. Whenever you call or text someone, you’re sending signals from your phone to one of your service provider’s cell towers, and whenever you receive a text or listen to someone on the other end of the call, your phone received the signals that make that possible from a cell tower. The problem is, as you travel further and further from the cell tower the signals both to and from the tower become weaker and weaker, fading over the distance. If the building you find yourself losing signal in is far away from areas with high cell coverage, then this might be contributing to your signal loss. Even if it’s not the main cause itself, a signal weakened by distance is more likely to be drowned out by obstructions than one that is close to its tower.