iPhone 5 lte signal/reception problem

So you got a new phone or you had your current one fixed? I'm having similar problems.

I don't think it's Apple I think it's our carrier. I've had fine speed and reception alll around with my iPhone 5 it's blazing fast at least double that of my iPhohe 4S's performance. My husband has the 4S now.
AT&T send a letter of apology now that our power is back that so many had poor or no cellular service in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy.

I have learned not to look at the bars, because it's so fast I honestly don't care waht the bar says LTE or 3G. I used my iPhone 5's power to run my iMac for days after Sandy, home alone in the dark with no heat or water, we loose our water when the power it out. The battery time was magnificent honestly. Hours on the iMac with only the iPhone 5 powering it and there was no difference in speed than when my broadband service, which was down also, is running. I ran up 3GB of use on my data plan in 6 days using my iPhone 5 pretty much most of the day into the night. There's not much to do in the dark and cold. I couldn't be more pleased. ALSO I have to note that my sister, with the same phone and network 2 towns, about 12 miles away, lost her service and when it returned it was a slow 3G connection. I am just thankful I did not loose mine. Try workking with your carrier and see if anything they can do might help. They actually replaced the lines from the road to my home a year ago because our cable, internet, anything wi-fi as well was so slow and would die out then surge back. When they FINALLY came out and tested the lines they said there was a significant drop from the road to my home, which explained my crappy wi-fi reception back then. Since they did that, all devices run very very fast, smoothly with no disconnects or lagging.

I have this problem also. Just had my iphone 5 swapped out for a new one because the reception was terrible. The reception on this new one was great, I noticed right away I had 4 bars, where before I had 2 — until i did the software update (to 6.0.1) — then the reception problem returned, and the bars went back down to 2.

I, like many of you, have the same experience toggling LTE on and off. Off = 3 bars; On = 2 bars. The network reception will read differently sometimes just by leaning a bit one way or the other. My wife's 4S doesn't do this. When I test hers and mine at the same time, side by side, hers comes up stronger. I did a field test with mine and the results are consistently bad. The customer service person at the genius bar said it could be software, hardware, or sim card. So starting from scratch, without restoring, just with the barebones + the update, it's happening.

When I toggle the LTE off and do a field test, my result is -85 (good); When I toggle LTE back on and do a test my result is -110 (bad).

I also notice that when I toggle LTE off for a minute or two, when I first toggle it back on, reception surges to 5 bars for an instant, then goes down to 2 or 1 bars.

I'm in Vancouver BC on Virgin (i.e., Bell network).

As an update. I switched the sim card — and the result is the same. Toggling LTE to "on" lowers the reception. Ironic, isn't it?

Same problems. I have replaced SIM card and replaced hardware with Apple and same problems with new phone.

Keep in mind that 3G signal strength is reported as RSSI while LTE is represented as RSRP. A RSRP number will be ~ -23dBm [lower] than RSSI for a similar signal strength location. I usually see pretty poor LTE with my iPhone 5 when the LTE RSRP is -107dBm or worse and as it gets in the -110dBm to -118dBm range, it drops off pretty rapidly.

While a -85 RSSI 3G signal is usable, it's actually not that great and unfortunately LTE in these same marginal areas is often not very good, esp. on the iPhone 5 which seems to have trouble in fringle signal areas.

The other thing to keep in mind is that just because your carrier has functional 3G in a location, they may not actually be sending out an LTE signal in the exact same tower site because of legal/local approvals or build-out schedues. The next town over from ours has 3G-only enabled towers even though we're supposed to have LTE rolled out throughout our region.

I suggest that you open a case with your carrier for low signal strength at your particular location and likely they'll admit that it is a fringe coverage area.

Thanks for these details, Pete boston. Although it doesn't make me feel much better, I appreciate being better informed about the issue, which may help when I do in fact open a case with my carrier. I suspect, however, that culpability (i.e., who or what's at fault here, anyway), will not be readily admitted by them, and according to the stories here (by users of a variety of carriers and networks), it is still difficult to tell what the cause of the problem is.

My iphone 5 otherwise is functioning well, and it is definitely a thing of beauty and (mostly) of great convenience.

Hi All,

Don't know if this is the same problem I am having as you lot..

Basically i have ok 3G receuption. I am on EE (t-mobile) so its merged with Orange.

I sometimes lose my signal in calls where I know the receiption is not great but can generally get it back within a minute.

Other times though at home where signal is 1 or 2 bars normally I look at my phone and there are no bars. It doesn't say No Signal or Searching straight away but reception doesnt come back until I reboot or turn airplane mode on and then off.

This keeps happening. I have tried resetting network settings, change carrier to manual and disable LTE but it keeps happening.

I hoped ios 6.0.1 would fix this but it didn't!

Any ideas at all?

I have AT&T - same exact issue. Phone and SIMS have been replaced. My husband has an iPad that is doing the same thing. What do they all have in common? IOS is my guess.

I have also been having this issue as well. I purchased an iPhone five running on Verizon about five weeks ago and signal strength is horrible compared to my iPhone 4S. Typically I have two to three bars at my house on wifi where my iPhone 4S has 5 bars. Also, when downloading video my phone often just dies - despite a what appears to be a stable connection on wifi with cellular also turned on.

I upgraded from 4 to 5, and since getting my iphone 5 I have not had a full 5 bar signal. I visited Toronto to help a buddy move and in some areas I would jump from 3-4 bars on 3G and when I enabled LTE I had

4 bars but my batt drained incredibly fast. I'm with Fido, and both my 4 and 5 were/are with fido as well. My main reason for upgrading was for the LTE and right now I have it disabled (to save batt life) otherwise my phone would last 4 hours use and about 10 hours stand-by. I'm hoping this is a software issue as well, many ppl are saying it is, I have upgraded to 6.1 iOS and the problem is still there (I would think signal in a phone would be primary issue to fix, be t would be battery and not lines on a keyboard or camera issues). Anyways I have about 2 days left to return the phone for a full refund so I'm debating waiting for a fix (if it is software) or wait till the next iphone comes out.

I've dealt with this through AT&T since I got the phone in September. I finally just switched LTE off and run it on '4G'. Signal strength is now normal. I also had problems watching videos on my AT&T UVerse WiFi. It will typically degrade to cellular quality video. Since I switched the LTE off, the phone is no longer constantly trying to switch back and forth. Battery life and call reliability are back up to levels I was used to seeing with my iPhone 4.

Glad to see that the bad VZW LTE coverage in Metro Boston has not gone unnoticed. Given my personal experience in NYC recently, VZW is going to be in for a rude awakening when RootMetric's does their next update for NYC as well.

http://www.boston.com/business/innovation/2012/11/15/named-best-cellphone-provid er-boston-area/y2imLNsosOnWHZohwHxkjO/story.html

http://www.rootmetrics.com/compare-carriers/united-states/boston/boston-november -2012/

Also having the exact same issues. I just got my iphone 5 16gb replaced today at the Genius bar. Issues included battery dying excessivly fast, LTE switching back to 3G and back to LTE. Sometimes getting LTE at one location and sometimes getting only 3G at that same location. Also network lost messages all the time and issues with dropped calls.

So far with this replacement and replacement sim card i am having the exact same problems. At work i can not even get LTE signal, i have 4 bars on 3G and it wont trigger over. I have tried toggling LTE, hard reboot etc.

So seems i am still having the exact same issues.

I just returned my iphone 5 :-( and took out my old iphone 4. Biggest change is the battery life, I charged it 1.5 days ago and I'm still at 68%!!!!! With the 5 I would have charged it twice by now. It does feel incredibly slow compared to the 5 but ill take it instead of dropped signal, dropped wifi, **** battery, and horrible LTE coverage (probably not apples fault but ill still add it to the list) o and that rattle is gone too