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Is Your Cell Phone Case Blocking Signals and Messing With Reception?

Written by: Clyde S.

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Time to read min

Like Smartphone technology, cell phone cases and covers make life easier by protecting our device from accidental damage.

It’s because of cell phone cases that users don’t worry about water / coffee spill damage. They don’t worry about sitting on their device and cracking its screen; or dropping the phone from a considerable height only to pick up the pieces.

Your phone casing is a life saver! But is it impeding reception?

A Blessing or A Curse?

Phone cases typically don’t interfere with phone signal. However, cases with metal or magnetic clips might harm the quality of phone signal.  

What Is The Working Theory Behind This Idea?

Depending on the design of the phone case, any item can potentially mess with reception if the internal cell antenna is blocked by the material.

However, most cases (including leather and plastic) aren’t capable of absorbing any amount of reception. Phone cases featuring metal implements can block or interfere with radio waves, which in turn affects signal quality. Following are additional top 5 reasons why we sometimes don’t receive strong cell signals.  One or two are surprising, to say the least.  

 

  • Local terrain
  • Distance from cell tower
  • Moving or standing vehicles
  • Vegetation in the area
  • Man-made obstructions
  • Atmospheric conditions

How to Test If Cell Phone Case Is Messing With the Reception?

no signal

While a pretty rare occurrence, some phone cases do block signals or affect their quality. Going to another room or even outside, while talking on your phone can improve signal quality.

However, this doesn’t always happen. In this case, you can restart or reboot your phone. 

How to Do This:

Take off the case. Now try your phone in several different situations, constantly checking the quality of phone signals. Make a phone call in all the normal settings you use the phone at, i.e. home and work. Turn your phone off for a few minutes; then turn the device back on.

Received a much improved phone signal? Your case is at fault.

You can also check these articles:

Check out these cases which have no affect in phone signal

Comments

Thanks. I got worried as my new Samsung M20 was not catching signal inside the brand new case. I removes and tried many places. Then I cam across your website. Now it is clear.

Sudipta Kumar Roy

brilliant …. spigen case with metal surround has been causing all the problems. . mobile signal has dramatically improved. thank you!

marvin wells

I’ve heard of people smoking & living till they were 90 & died of something not smoking related but is it ok to smoke ?

I bought a magnetic phone cover a week ago & after that my phone (i6) was reluctant to receive calls & calls I finally made would drop out .. internet was unusable & I noticed blue tooth was weaker than usual .

Magnetics can also put blue lines in your phones screen which would be annoying.

The minute I removed my phone from magnetic case all the problems have gone away .. good luck to people who think magnetic phone cases can’t affect your phone .. maybe they can smoke till 90 too

Graham Campbell

This is very true. And anti emf radiation cases that say you should use them to block radiation make things worse in this way. You can’t block radiation without blocking the entire phone signal. Good Post.

Tanya

Yes, thank you. Had bad speakerphone problems— echoing on both my end and the other person’s end. They often sounded muffled and echoed while on soeakerphone, but I could not hear them otherwise. Took off the hard plastic shell and it WAY BETTER. Reception the same, but echoing gone as soon as I took the case off. Thank you!!

LaVonne

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