Q: iPhone 4S unable to turn off 3G?!

If you have the 4G symbol (HSPA+) at this time then AT&T has, or is about to update your towers to 4G LTE. This means they are probably soon going to turn off the EDGE network in your area so there would be no need for the switch.

Cheers!!!

Vodafone Portugal 3G switch available on ios5.1!!!

Battery improvement.......still testing....

YESSSSS

deggie wrote:

 

If you have the 4G symbol (HSPA+) at this time then AT&T has, or is about to update your towers to 4G LTE. This means they are probably soon going to turn off the EDGE network in your area so there would be no need for the switch.

You've got me a bit confused, deggie (not hard, I know). Are you saying that HSPA+ is the same thing as 4G LTE? My understanding is that they're two different things, requiring different types of SIM cards.

There are no iPhones that can provide LTE. The iPhones 4S that are showing 4G on AT&T are doing so with HSPA+, fake 4G or 4G light, if you will. LTE and HSPA+ are not the same. I do not know if they require different SIMs, but the comm chipset in the iPad 2+ announced yesterday is more sophisticated and includes the LTE technology not found in the comm chipset in the iPhone 4S.

At this stage, "4G" is meaningless in technical terms. The specification defined is not met by ANY carrier anywhere on the planet. It's now simply a marketing tool. Nothing more than a statement meaning "faster than 3G".

I think Meg was confused by deggie's statement. Deggie did not mean to imply that LTE and HSPA+ are the same, what I believe he intended to convey was that If you are in an area where AT&T has upgraded their service to provide HSPA+ coverage, they are planning to decommision their EDGE network in the very near future. I'm fairly certain this is thanks to a deal with regulators intended to free up that frequency range for other things.

KiltedTim wrote:

 

I think Meg was confused by deggie's statement. Deggie did not mean to imply that LTE and HSPA+ are the same, what I believe he intended to convey was that If you are in an area where AT&T has upgraded their service to provide HSPA+ coverage, they are planning to decommision their EDGE network in the very near future. I'm fairly certain this is thanks to a deal with regulators intended to free up that frequency range for other things.

Yes, you understood my confusion perfectly. Thanks!

He said a bit more than that. He said that if they had HSPA+, which now identifies as 4G on the iPhone 4S, that they were also likely getting ready to implement LTE on the same towers. Which would be why they were going to switch off EDGE

You have completed the puzzle, Dah+veed, that is exactly what I meant. And Kilted Tim is correct this is a result of the failed T-Mobile acquisition (they were going to use T-Mobile frequencies acquired for EDGE) and regulatory compliance to free up bandwidth/frequencies as they add 4G LTE.

If I were someone living in a fringe area where the 3G signal is a problem I would seriously look at switching providers to get better coverage.

Ironic to read this today, considering the opposite happened.

Could you safely say that someone living in a fringe are was likely someone living outside of oe away from a main city?

Actually in places like New York City you could be in the main city and have fringe coverage.

There are a lot of things on the fringe in NYC

I'm on an iPhone 4S on the Bell Network in Canada. I just updated to IOS 5.1 and the "Disable 3G" switch is missing also. All that is available is "Disable cellular data".

That's to be expected because Bell doesn't have a 2G network to fall back on.

WOW, finaly got the 3G switch

so glad

thanx apple