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What's the Problem With iPhone 3G Reception?
CWmike writes "Apple's iPhone 3G was just a couple of days old when reports began trickling onto the company's support forum from dissatisfied customers complaining about poor reception. Although no one outside of Apple and AT&T — and maybe a chipmaker or two — really knows, that has not kept others from speculating, or in a few cases, making claims based on unnamed sources. What's going on? We may not have all the answers, but we do have questions. Gregg Keizer put together everything we know in a FAQ on the griping about iPhone 3G reception."
We've all made our own Canadian version of the iPhone:
1. take your regular plain old cellphone
2. buy an iPod touch
3. buy duct-tape
4. if you can't figure out step four by yourself, please return your Handyman membership card to Red Green.
And there is an article (auto-translated article in link) in the Swedish magazine Ny Teknik (New Tehcnology) about this too.
So it's a problem that is well discussed these days.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Apple sells crappy products! If you stick with a majority company like MS you will have no problems people! http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com/
It is extremely frustrating the amount of dropped calls and call failed's I get. I had a sony-erickson for 3 years and had maybe 3 or 4 dropped calls and maybe 2 or 3 times when i cannot make a call. I do those numbers in like 3 days of iphone use. It is not my area, I always have 3g, but the bars do fluctuate wildly from 1 or 2 to 3 or 4 in the same location. I love the phone but i am worried if this is a problem they can fix or will it get worse?
...it's because you're not praying hard enough. Try prostrating yourself towards Cupertino five times a day.
My reception's fine, but I really wish Apple would hurry up and fix the slow typing bug...
It sounds like a trivial thing, but coupled with the inherent inaccuracy of the iPhone keyboard it makes the phone barely usable for text messaging...
We have now reached Whiny, artistic types post lengthy diatribes about how this terrible design flaw has made the device unusable and scarred them emotionally.
If J.K.R wrote Windows: Puteulanus fenestra mortalis!
There are several reasons that might lead to these
problems:
- bad antenna design
- interference noise from other electronics in the handset
- bugs in protocol processing
The most surprising aspect is that Apple and AT&T
probably knew about this much before the launch. The
amount of testing required on a cell phone to get
certification is enormous. Unless, at&t waived all testing for the iphone, it is pretty certain that they have seen the problems in the lab. And
this is the question. How can they release the
product if they know it has problems?
For anyone interested see the process for GCF and PTRCB certifications, that include both
Over-The-Air tests, drive tests and protocol tests.
I live in a relatively rural area, but close enough to a large city that I can get 3G service at home. I was (and returned to) using a Samsung BlackjackII. I was able to use it without any issues at all and got 3G and EDGE service at and near my home. When I brought the new iphone home, I was unable to get anything other than a standard connection (no EDGE and no 3G) and sometimes I couldn't even get a reliable enough signal to make simple phone calls. After a few days of frustration, I returned it to the store and went back to the BlackjackII.
Just another datapoint.
AT&T has had these kind of problems for years with their 3G service, it only took a successful platform to bring their shortcomings into the public light.
Mine is Good
What's interesting is the fact that even after this and other numerous problems with this particular device, majority of the post (on /., Engadget, Apple forums etc) about them would include something like "I love the phont, but..."
What's wrong with you? How would you "love" your phone if you can't use it for its primary purpose? Is it mandatory to "love" this phone? Would you burn in hell if you don't? Or most of the people just lack balls to say that you don't "love" it anymore?
Mass acceptance by following the herd is one thing, not having guts to call a spade a spade is another.
No, it needs an iTower. Well i-er anyway.
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
Well, Microsoft -did- try and copy Apple when they made Vista...
I have no problems with the touchscreen on the iPhone, but my wife doesn't like it.
I seem to be able to two thumb type on it faster than my previous phone.
Do you have fat fingers possibly? I really like the error correction, and the fact that it "learns" new words. One of my Farsi speaking friends has added a whole new vocabulary to her phone via this way.
..........FULL STOP.
Infineon chips. (ex-Siemens)
I had the displeasure of working with products from this company, it is as fun as having a fork stuck in your eye.
Crappy documentation, flaky concepts, incompatible versions, etc.
how long until
I seem to have the opposite problem, very poor wifi speeds!
My new iPhone 3G works great with 3G. No problems there so far, although I've not traveled around too much with it.
What seems to be a problem is the iPhone connecting to wifi spots... in that the attained speeds are so arrevatingly slow that I turn it off! This of course is fine since at the momen since I've not exceeded the monthly ball and chain set by the money sucking service provider.
However, it's supposed to work with Wifi modems. I have a linksys N wifi modem that my mac book pro is connected to so there are no speed problems with my internet connection. That's just fine. It's the wifi connection.
Apple seems to have trouble with their iPhone and Mac Books connecting to Wifi modems by other manufacturers. At one point I had to shut off the burst mode on my linksys because it was crashing my mac book pro with OSX 10.5 no less!!!
Now I don't even bother with wifi at home with my Apple products. Sigh.
I'm an idiot, I admit it: I've had BOTH versions of the iPhone. They're the same, folks, no better, no worse. If you're tinfoil hat's a little too snug (or you're holding it with either left or right hand) it tends to drop calls.
Really: the emperor's latest fashion is made of the same material. The instrument is no better as a phone, no faster as a PDA, no cleaner as a browser. It is still a very poorly designed phone, a not-TOO-bad PDA (esp. for Mac users) and a darned superior portable internet device.
Cellphone-to-cellphone reliability and call quality are illusions, get used to it. It's not how well the bear dances, it's that the bear dances AT ALL. Next, we'll rant about the fallacy of packet-switched vs. circuit-switched, at least as regards telephony.
a nice girl like you doesn't need a penis
The iPhone only has a b/g chipset. Performance of a MBP against a 802.11n access point isn't really indicative of how the b/g network would perform. You could be having considerable interference you'd never notice with the laptop.
Burst mode on the Linksys isn't part of the 802.11n draft but rather a proprietary Linksys extension - so really it's no wonder it isn't working well with non-Linksys clients.
Kind of sad that this is the first thing on peoples' minds. Would you not prefer Apple to recall the phones for a fix, or issue a firmware update that takes care of the problem? No.... you were wronged and therefore must sue.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Unfortunately, legal action, or threat thereof, is often the only way of inducing a company to recall, update, patch, refund, or otherwise ameliorate one of their fuckups.
Some lawsuits are about vengeance; but that doesn't mean that lawsuits aren't a legitimate means of obtaining redress.
We've got one _securities_ (not engineering) analyst speculating that it's a problem with the chipset, and that it's unfixable. Yeah. Then we've got Businessweek echoing that claim, citing two unnamed sources (one of which is probably the securities analyst, the other of which is likely someone repeating the securities analyst). No technical data whatsoever on those claims.
Then we've got Ny Teknik, which cites a problem between the antenna and the amplifier (I would speculate they are referring to antenna impedence matching). They again cite unnamed sources, but they at least claim there was actual testing done. If this is the case, it would not be fixable in firmware, but it's at least not a design flaw.
On top of that, there's the nature of the problems. Poor signal strength and low speeds both could be caused by the problems of the nature Ny Teknik suggests, but dropping calls when switching from 3G to Edge argues for some sort of firmware problem, dropping calls during the handoff. Of course, it's also possible there are multiple problems; low signal strength exposes a problem with the handoff.
Finally there's the question of how Apple missed it during testing. It seems widespread enough that it would have been noticed, which argues for a manufacturing problem or perhaps a last minute software change.
I've been using 3G in one of the pilot cities since it rolled out many years ago and the problem has always been limited coverage. Even now that the infrastructure is more mature. Going from 3G to non-3G networks isn't a smooth transition, so you might have a very weak signal where there is potential to have a better one.
Go buy a European phone that only works on our 1900MHz frequency and you'll see how limited certain types of coverage can be.
If AT&T were to make a commercial like Verizon's, the subscribers would be followed around by a bunch of retards (apologies to all the retards that may read Slashdot).
I have calls that sound crystal clear one second and then get dropped the next...while both parties are stationary.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
I apologize for my lack of clarity, see Xenocrates. I bought the new one because the mobile internet access tools are worth it. I've decided that having seamless email, some web, and relatively updated maps are indeed worth it. As to the other poster "never" having lost an AT&T call: Bullshit. Unprovable, and clearly this thread's existence posits that the opposite might be true. (It is certainly true, but I'll stick to the more conservative case.)
1) Samsung handsets use the same Infineon 3G chipset and side by side have been shown to not have the same problems as the iphone
2)I have an iphone. It worked great for 1 week and then the data service stopped working.
The phone hasnt changed. It's a network issue. As more iphones have come on in big cities they just cant serve the demand.
So its the phone which could be performing better (as seen by the side by side Sansung comparison) >and its the network (as seen by many people whose service only recently went to hell but used to be fine)
Some lawsuits are about vengeance; but that doesn't mean that lawsuits aren't a legitimate means of obtaining redress.
True. It just means that you're American.
(tongue only partly in cheek)
myselfmusic
A bit of seriousness here. One bar, four bars, five bars - this is no real info at all. At least in the Amateur Radio world, there is objective testing as to what S-9 on the meter means (50 uV @ 50 ohms).
There is no such testing done on cellphones. I have never seen it done. If there was objective testing done, I wonder really how bad the results would be.
I was out on a bike ride and right under a AT&T tower resting and I was getting only two bars. Go figure.
Personally, signal strength displays are orchestrated frauds foisted on the public by the cellphone manufacturer and carrier working in collusion and marketed as being truth when in reality they bear nothing of the sort.
Not Nessasarily true. Ok in the USA, GSM technology may be nascent. Certainly 3G is not so widespread. Here in Europe, especially UK, 3G has been around for much longer. We already make heavy use of it, and you can buy USB dongles with a SIM card, to have mobile internet, at up to 3.6Mbps (in some cases, up to 7Mbps). This is already popular amongst Business users, and also Tennants, who do not wish to fit a DSL line, yet require fast internet. So the technology is pretty mature, and usable.
Yet the iPhone 3G is having problems here too. You cant really blame O2's network, as it is a mature network, that has been around for a long time (O2 used to be BT Cellnet....)
Have a nice day!
http://www.macrumors.com/2008/08/18/iphone-3g-connectivity-affecting-2-of-customers-software-fix-soon/