Does your phone sometimes struggle to make a clear connection for a call? If your cell phone keeps dropping calls, it’s likely due to one of these common reasons that we’ll explain below.
Signal Dead Zone
Sometimes, your phone isn’t going to be able to make a stable call connection, and it has nothing to do with your phone itself. A signal dead zone can occur in remote and populated areas, as natural and human-made obstacles or poor cell tower alignment can cause it.
Signal dead zones are most common in rural and remote areas with few cell towers and plenty of natural obstacles like trees, hills, and mountains. But signal dead zones can also occur in cities from tall buildings or tunnels.
How To Fix: There’s not much a person can do besides move out of the dead zone. Your best bet is an elevated area free of obstacles like trees, buildings, or hills.
Cell Tower Congestion
The reason your cell phone keeps dropping calls may have to do with the nearest cell tower. As you probably know, our phones need to connect to a network tower before they can connect to another device.
But a connection could be impossible if a phone is too far away from the nearest cell tower or that tower is overwhelmed with traffic congestion. A notable increase in traffic for a cell tower—a large gathering of people in a remote area for some kind of event—could overwhelm the tower and hamper connections.
How To Fix: You can try to refresh your connection with the cell tower by toggling your phone’s airplane mode or resetting the network settings. However, you’ll likely have to move to a different area with a less congested tower.
Hardware Problems
If you’re in an area that should have a stable tower connection and has few obstacles, the problem might be the phone’s hardware. If your phone routinely drops calls or stops connecting to the network regardless of where you make them, the SIM card or EMI shielding could be the culprit.
EMI shielding protects your cell phone from electromagnetic interference from other devices that can disrupt your phone’s connection. And the SIM card grants your phone access to the carrier’s network. If either of these components is damaged, your phone will struggle to connect.
How To Fix: If the problem is the SIM card, you can simply replace it. But if the EMI shielding is broken, you may need to replace your phone.
Now, the next time your phone drops a call, you will have an idea of the problem and hopefully be able to fix it!
