Notification delays, orange icons, and poor data connection

nchadwick · Jan 13, 2014

My apologies if this has been posted elsewhere. I found a loosely related thread on google's support forum, but nothing here.

Bought a Nexus 5 and I've been trying out Straight Talk ATT and I've been noticing these problems, most likely all related:

I've been getting notification delays for push data services. Namely, my work email(exchange) and gmail. Sometimes the notification won't even come through. I'm up to a half hour on my last one, still waiting on it. SMS works just fine. Haven't tested MMS, particularly because I don't get many of those. The data connections does work though. I can manually load pages just fine, if a bit slow at first like the ping is astronomical. Almost makes me think it's establishing a connection each time.

When I check the color of the wifi or cellular connection icon, it's frequently orange. Most of the time it will quickly resolve itself to white in the few seconds it takes to check it. From what I understand, orange means it's having trouble talking to google services? This shouldn't affect exchange notifications.

I'm getting poorer connections quality than I expected. I live in Ithaca and while my home has poor Verizon connection(so I expected similar from ATT), I've barely found any place at work or the mall that can hold ANY LTE signal or a decent HSPA signal. HSPA speed tests give me under 0.5mbps up/down, while the only LTE test I've been able to run gave me 2.5/1 up/down.

The aforementioned thread on google's forums mentioned flashing 4.4.0's radio apk, has anyone else tried this?

Which APN setting affects the data part of the connection? Is it just the APN type?

nchadwick · Jan 14, 2014

Bump.

I'm starting to wonder if my problem is exacerbated by my current postpaid VZW phone getting data notifications much quicker. I'm suspecting that Straight Talk has a lower priority on ATT towers, thus why my data notifications take up to minutes sometimes. Anyone know of a way to confirm this?

maucer · Mar 24, 2014

Always On Push Notifications android app

I am not sure if anyone is following this thread anymore, but I switched to StraightTalk about a month ago, and have been experiencing huge delays in my google voice notifications as well (among other things). I've tried several different apps to get this resolved, but none have worked for me... so I decided to write my own. It was published to the google play store this morning (Android 2.3+ currently). If anyone sees this, please try it out, and let me know what you think.

It's called "Always On Push Notifications". I can't post a link right now because this is my first post on these forums though.

MrObvious · Mar 24, 2014

maucer said:
I am not sure if anyone is following this thread anymore, but I switched to StraightTalk about a month ago, and have been experiencing huge delays in my google voice notifications as well (among other things). I've tried several different apps to get this resolved, but none have worked for me... so I decided to write my own. It was published to the google play store this morning (Android 2.3+ currently). If anyone sees this, please try it out, and let me know what you think.

It's called "Always On Push Notifications". I can't post a link right now because this is my first post on these forums though.

What fixed it? I find I have to archive my old messages/call logs for it to not lag.

maucer · Mar 24, 2014

MrObvious said:
What fixed it? I find I have to archive my old messages/call logs for it to not lag.

I am not sure what you mean, but I was noticing similar issues with my Nexus 5 on ST using ATT towers. While on LTE at the office, my connection was always great, but if I wasn't actively using my phone, my cell signal would go orange, and all of my notifications were significantly delayed. Furthermore, even trying to browse the internet with an orange signal would just idle and sometimes would not complete at all.

The app I wrote attempts to prevent this by simply keeping your connection active. It does this by manually sending out a heartbeat using the Google Cloud Messaging service approximately every interval that you define in the app. This helps keep your notifications flowing. On top of that, the application will also make a very small data request (~60 bytes), to help prevent the APN from timing out your connection.

I have found that those two things are enough to fix the issues I have had with StraightTalk.

MrObvious · Mar 25, 2014

maucer said:
I am not sure what you mean, but I was noticing similar issues with my Nexus 5 on ST using ATT towers. While on LTE at the office, my connection was always great, but if I wasn't actively using my phone, my cell signal would go orange, and all of my notifications were significantly delayed. Furthermore, even trying to browse the internet with an orange signal would just idle and sometimes would not complete at all.

The app I wrote attempts to prevent this by simply keeping your connection active. It does this by manually sending out a heartbeat using the Google Cloud Messaging service approximately every interval that you define in the app. This helps keep your notifications flowing. On top of that, the application will also make a very small data request (~60 bytes), to help prevent the APN from timing out your connection.

I have found that those two things are enough to fix the issues I have had with StraightTalk.

That answered it. It must be a StraightTalk thing. Weird.

DJames1 · Sep 15, 2014

New observation on this problem:

- GMail notifications not arriving
- When I check I see that the WiFi icon is orange
- Phone is still connected to the internet, I can browse, but icon remains orange and no notifications arrive
- Only when I disconnect/reconnect Wifi does it recover

I also discovered that the WiFi icon actually turns orange at the moment that Google tries to send me a notification. It can be fine for hours before that.

It turned out that this only happens when I have the cellular radio turned off, by turning on Airplane Mode and then turning WiFi back on. With the cellular radio on and connected to the network, even with Mobile Data turned off, everything is fine with WiFi.

I think it's an authentication bug with Google Services. Somewhere in the message notification sequence it tries to either authenticate your phone or perhaps locate it via the cellular network, and if it fails then the connection to Google Services is flagged as faulty. The failure could be caused by having the cellular radio off, or perhaps by being in a bad reception area.

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Notification delays, orange icons, and poor data connection

nchadwick

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