Here’s How Verizon Torture Tests Its Phones
Verizon is the largest wireless provider in America, so it makes sense that the carrier would stress test its network.
What you might not know, though, is that Verizon also puts every smartphone and tablet that uses its network through similarly rigorous tests.
To see exactly how Verizon evaluates its gadgets, I took a trip to the carrier’s testing facility in the sleepy hills of Bedminster, New Jersey, where smartphones are torture tested for everything from durability to audio quality and more. If the phones fail, they’re sent back to the manufacturer for improvements.
Check out the photos below to see what your phones go through before they land in your hands.
Signal testing
The first stop on my short tour was the Antenna Test Lab, where Verizon checks to ensure that the antennas on every smartphone function well. At the center of the room are a dummy head and a hand that holds the phone being tested.
(Daniel Howley/Yahoo Tech)
An antenna fires a signal at the phone and rotates around the handset, checking to see how much interference the head, hand, and phone itself cause.
Information collected about the phone is then presented on a series of computer screens. Basically, Verizon explained, you want the readout to show a large red sphere, almost like a ripe tomato. If a portion of the image is blue, it means there’s a large amount of interference.
(Daniel Howley/Yahoo Tech)
Drop testing
After the Antenna Test Lab, I stopped by the Drop Test Lab, where — you guessed it — Verizon drop tests its devices.
(Daniel Howley/Yahoo Tech)
The room includes two large machines. The first is a kind of tumbler that spins around and repeatedly simulates randomly dropping your phone from a height of 3 or 1.5 feet depending on its size. Regular-size phones usually get the 3-foot-drop treatment, while big-screen phones, or phablets, take the 1.5-foot fall.
Verizon says its phablets fall from a lower height because they are heavier and therefore generate greater forces when they fall.
(Daniel Howley/Yahoo Tech)
The second machine drops phones on each of their sides onto a steel plate sitting on top of a concrete slab. Both tests are supposed to ensure that Verizon’s devices can withstand the bumps and bruises of everyday life.
VOLTE audio testing
If a phone is strong enough to make it through the Drop Test Lab, it moves on to the Voice Over LTE or VOLTE Audio Lab, a large, anechoic chamber or quiet room. Designed to absorb echoes, the room measures how sound waves behave as they leave the phone and bounce off your phone and head.
(Daniel Howley/Yahoo Tech)
The room uses various noise-canceling materials to ensure that it is absolutely silent when the phone is being tested. Verizon even went as far as to mount the room itself on a series of springs to make sure that trucks traveling on a nearby road don’t generate any unwanted vibrations.
Noise testing
From the VOLTE room, we moved on to the Noise Cancellation Room, which is designed to test how well a phone filters out background noise during a phone call. To do this, researchers mount the phone in a human analog and turn it on. The phone then makes a call, and the researchers play an audio recording from the human analog into the handset’s receiver.
(Daniel Howley/Yahoo Tech)
They then blast several different simulated background sounds, ranging from a busy intersection to a crowded restaurant to a train station, and check to see if the audio from the phone can still be heard. Despite the background noise being loud enough to rumble the floors outside the testing room, we were easily able to hear all of analog’s prerecorded lines.
Wireless testing
The last stop on the testing tour is the Shield Room, which serves as a large faraday cage that blocks out all outside wireless connections. The point of the room is to test how well each phone’s antenna works without any interference from other sources.
(Daniel Howley/Yahoo Tech)
After a phone or tablet passes all the tests, more are sent out for real-world testing with regular folks who use them as they would their own devices.
And if all goes according to plan, these same devices will find their way into your hands.
Email Daniel at dhowley@yahoo-inc.com; follow him on Twitter at @DanielHowley or on Google+ here.
