iPhone 3G Reception Problems? You're Not Alone - Continued
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iPhone 3G Reception Problems? You're Not Alone, which has been locked. The thread was too long and some browsers were timing out. The above link goes back to the original thread.
very helpful - thanks for this report. this adds to the point kbeat has made further up - that the reception might be similar to other phones, only that the signal is not managed well.
Yes, As soon as I walked out of the apple store I walked to the AT&T store and asked for a new SIM card. The salesman did even hesitate and gave me a brand new one.
I do have to report my iPhone 3G is perfectly fine and has not dropped a call in five days. 3G coverage is accurate and shows a consistant signal with my hand blocking the antennas. While talking on the phone and I lose 3G, it switches to the EDGE without problems. If you are having similar issues with an iphone 3G I suggest the same. My only regret is I didn't take care of it sooner and just got angry. They actually took care of the problem and the apple genious hinted at a defective 3G antenna.
malamarbarmomo wrote:
Yes, As soon as I walked out of the apple store I walked to the AT&T store and asked for a new SIM card. The salesman did even hesitate and gave me a brand new one.
I do have to report my iPhone 3G is perfectly fine and has not dropped a call in five days. 3G coverage is accurate and shows a consistant signal with my hand blocking the antennas. While talking on the phone and I lose 3G, it switches to the EDGE without problems. If you are having similar issues with an iphone 3G I suggest the same. My only regret is I didn't take care of it sooner and just got angry. They actually took care of the problem and the apple genious hinted at a defective 3G antenna.
Later
Why don't you list your sim card number so the people here who have the same card don't waste a trip to an AT&T store?
It has nothing to do with the sim card, I swapped my sim card, I wiped and reloaded my phone and nothing worked. Until you replace the iPhone with a working iPhone, nothing will work. The 3g antenna on the iPhone is defective.
You can't fix a broke piece of hardware with software or firmware. If they could then they wouldn't have needed to launch the iPhone 3g, they would have just added the 3g receiver with software, which you couldn't do. If the hardware is defective, no software or firmware can fix it.
I am an Apple Fanboy but I am seriously disappointed Apple hasn't addressed this issue and how they are wasting all of our time by denying it and playing the blame game like we are idiots.
I returned it back to Apple, because I paid full price of $500 for mine and I am not dealing with their problems when I paid that kind of price. I went back to a "real" phone and reverted back to my reliable BlackBerry that I can hear, and that I can accomplish what I need to at the speed of light, and that has no issues, and works great for what it was designed for.
OK so here is my take on the problem.
First let me begin by telling you that the bars on the top of the phone don't really mean much. The true measure is the actual signal strength your phone's antenna's can receive and that is in untis of power or dBm. In fact, the power is so miniscule that it is in the order of 1/1000 of 1 watt. Anyway, there is no real convention in the relationship between a bar and signal strength. For one phone maker one bar may mean -90dBm and for some other it may mean -102dBm which is actually 1/16 fo the power compared; every 3dB you are looking at a factor of 2, so -102-(-92) is 12; that is 1/2 divided by 1/2 divided by 1/2 divided by 1/2 divided by 1/2 or in other words 1/16 of the original value. (BTW the lower the worse).
If you want to try it on your iPhone, go the phone application, type
3001#12345# and then press the talk button. You'll see a bunch of meaningless information unless you are in RF. The number you see above instead of the bars is the dBm power. It is a negative value so say -50 is probably the highest you'll see, and -107 is probably the lowest you'll see before it gets switch to 2.5G.
Now, there is another piece to this and it is called receive sensitivity. The latter typically separates a good phone radio hardware from a bad one. You see, the Rx sensitivity of a phone's radio hardware allows the phone to work with very low signals. Your typical cell phone has a sensitivity value somewhere around -107dBm, so any signals lower than those will be useless and cause interference.
In the case of the 3G iPhone there are 2.5G radios for GSM/EDGE (all bands) and 3G radios for UMTS/HSDPA (all bands). Both require battery power to function but both do not work simultaneously. When you switch your iPhone 3G Network option to off, all you are doing is turning off a power hungry 3G radio. Yes, 3G is far worse that 2.5G when it comes to battery consumption. Therefore, it makes you think why Apple has chosen to insist to all 3G iPhone owners to keep an eye on that magic switch.
Now, the weakness on the reception of the 3G iPhone may attributed to either poor hardware selection on the radios, poor software driving those radios, poor implementation between the radios and the other devices they interface, or a combination of the latter. Having seen what the first iPhone could do, and how much Apple is betting with this device, I hope for them it boils down to software (really firmware in this case). It may be simply that the firmware is not properly controlling the radios power therefore yielding poor signal quality. The antennas I believe are OK since the 2.5G reception seems to be par with other cellphones. I am putting my money on the control of the 3G radio vs battery drainage. It may have been over done to keep battery life to a max.
I am going to hold on to my 3G iPhone. Frustrations aside, as one whole package it still much better than the Nokias, HTCs, Ericssons, and LGs I have owned in the past. Apple is under a lot of pressure from millions of unhappy consumers as well as operators such as AT&T, O2, Telefonica, etc. that are seeing their performance statistics hit rock bottom with the all the flood of iPhone 3G users.
I forecast the following:
1. Firmware upgrade (very soon)
2. Shorter battery life on the 3G iPhone due to firmware upgrade
3. Class action suit (heck we are in the US... only way to do it)
4. Apple upgrading batteries
5. Everybody happy and waiting in line for the new iPhone 3.5G 64GB phone in July 2009.
The people I know who still have the iPhone 3G barely get 5 to 6 hours out of a full charge, anything less would make it completely useless in my opinion.
All this boils down to is still:
Cool toy to brag about, very little substance and due to abysmal 3G performance, ridiculously short battery life, crippled outlook sync (no notes, To Dos), crippled bluetooth, hardly to be taken seriously as a smartphone.
In the areas I mentioned, the Nokias, HTCs, Sony-Ericssons and Samsungs out there, still beat the iPhone hands down. And every day I read more and more on this boards about features everyone else has and has had for years, just not the iPhone.
True, the iPhone has a lot of cool features, but it's lagging at least two or three generations behind current 3G handsets in core functionality. My bet is that it'll take Apple two or three more iPhone generations to turn an iPod with auxiliary, basic phone functions into the phone with iPod it should have been.
Swizz Cheese that's not true!
The iPhone is a great 3G device and I'm sure that Apple will adjust the radio sensitivity with an update.
Somehow tethering my iPhone using NetShare made me realize how good 3G really is.
I know it sounds crazy but you really don't need need 3G for voice, just use edge and I'm sure
you will be happy with the voice calls. And I know buying the 3G iPhone was
so that you can have voice and internet at the same time with faster speeds, An so did I but It's not hard for me switch 3G on and off, plus it saves me battery life.
I constantly get over 1Mbps D, 200 Kbps up on only 1 to 2 bars of 3G.
I was also using skype on the road with my 3G iphone and Vista HP and it worked freaking well.
This possibly debunks my theory that this was an AT&T issue, but I also think its not the hardware but the actual software that handles the calling on the the iPhone.
So folks the reason Apple has not issued a statement is to not get the media involved.
We will have a patch in one week and everyone will forget that we ever had 3G issues.
I don't know if you know this or not but none of the blackberry's are able to work at the speed of light : )
You need to do you're homework in Physics,
I think the fastest those things go is the speed of turtle!
