Aussie paper says iPhone 4 antenna is no problem, Kiwi launch hits snag - Page 3

I will second that. A friend of mine calls his wife on his daily commute and they both have AT&T. They were dropping as many calls with their iPhones as their Motorola RAZR flip phones before. It's AT&T.

How are the launches going in all the other countries getting iPhone4 today?
Come on people. We know you are out there.

Like Consumer Reports, French "Consumer Reports", Que Choisir, can't recommend the iPhone 4 due to antenna issue
http://www.quechoisir.org/pages/brev...6D0038AD89.htm

What difference does it make? That is the free enterprise system. Would you rather have the federal government provide your cell service? It would all be compatible probably mediocre with no incentive to improve. Sort of like our public education system.

It can be Australia is like my country (Canada) --- large country with concentrated population density in top 5 cities. Regardless of that, we don't hear complaints about Verizon dropping calls like mad --- so it is about specific carrier network's performance, NOT a country's regulatory issue.

If doesn't make sense to conclude that US is xxx years behind this or that country --- when Verizon has a bunch of Droid users (that uses even more data per month than the iphone) and no complaints about network performance.


Europe actually has fewer competition than the US --- Norway has 2 carriers, France has 3 carriers, Sweden has 3 carriers. It doesn't matter whether you can use the iphone in all 3 French carriers if all 3 carriers face minimal competition (they were all charged with price fixing a few years ago) are going to screw you.

Verizon being the top carrier in the US with only 32% market share --- that's the lowest in the industrialized world, period.


Telstra also give you very few data allowance per month.


No doubt there is going to be a performance difference --- but is that attributable to say population density? Much easier to cover Australia or Canada when you cover the top 5 cities, you cover 40-50% of the population.


AT&T also spent --- quite publicly --- massive amount of money on their network upgrades.


I am not praising any "backward" carrier. Do you know that US is 4 years ahead of Europe in FTTH fiber deployment? It's a matter of perspective.

http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=172028


I am not promoting CDMA in this thread at all. I am saying that Telstra gives you 250-500 MB per month for an iphone data plan, Australia having population density that is easy to cover people in big cities,...

Now compare that to AT&T with just discontinued unlimited data allowance on your iphone and much harder to cover people because of population density...

AT&T ain't that bad.

Reading the article it did seem to be an epic fail.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/ga...-on-sale-in-NZ

By whom? I don't know, but both Apple and Vodafone got bad press on the issue. But it was far from a nationwide release, like the iPad release it was only sold in a couple of stores, in a couple of cities.

What you're saying about coverage is true, but my comparison was (at least in my mind), between cities in Canada and Australia versus cities in the USA. It's clear that performance is going to be bad in rural areas for the reasons you mention and it seems to me it will be the same in all countries.

What I mean is that if you are walking around in Vancouver or Toronto or Adelaide or Sydney, the quality of the connection seems better (anecdotally of course), and the incidence of dead zones or dropped calls much lower. So the scarcity of coverage in rural or remote areas doesn't really feed into that at all.

As I've said a bunch of times over the course of this whole "antennagate" thing, before the software adjustment of the bar reading, I always got five bars or sometimes four bars everywhere I went. I've also never *ever* experienced a dropped call in over five years of cell phone use in my area (Canada). That's probably anomalous, but I would argue that the (apparently) huge number of dropped calls in New York and San Francisco in the US is probably equally anomalous and likely due to the quality of AT&T's network IMO.

Click-baiting, no doubt.

Yeah I'm on a 3GS in Wellington , NZ. I had a spate of dropped calls a while back. But, to give Vodafone their dues they fixed the problem with a bit of feedback. Turns out that it was a repeater problem. If no one rings them about it, nothing gets fixed. The techs were very good.

Now the Off Shore based call centre on the other hand are a completely different story. What a disaster!

In Norway there are 2 physical carriers, but there are several virtual carriers too. There are (I believe) 2 carriers that are physical in the major cities, and virtual in the rest of the country.

A virtual carrier buys capacity from the physical carriers, in case you are unfamiliar There is also a government sanctioned price calculator to help consumers in selecting among all the carriers and programs. Some are better for heavy overall use, others are targeted for texting, data... and so on.

So there is absolutely a healthy competition here. Most phones are sold with a binding period of 12 months. If you want to leave before the binding period is over, you'll of course have to pay some money to cover the initial subsidy (at least with my carrier this fee goes down with the months remaining of the contract).

But you can buy the phone without any binding - or subsidy - too. If you buy from the Apple Store, you'll get the iPhone with no strings attached. Up to you to find the best carrier/program, and you can switch whenever you want. Sounds good?

You people are absurd.

AT&T doesn't even have 7.2mbit rolled out yet. Verizon 3G barely deserves the title with the pathetic EVDO rev A specs. Australia has 3 complete networks with 7.2mbit as a baseline, Telstra's network for example exceeded the iPhone4's specs before the 3GS release last year. Most of it now offers 4 times the bandwidth than the iPhone4 baseband even offers!

In Australia we haven't had ANY of the issues hyped up by the network poor USA since the iPhone3G. Nor the battery life issues because we all already had 3G phones for years and were used to it.

Just get over it America. Apple since the iPhone 3G have been releasing phones that exceed your cell network. It has been comic watching how insular the American view point is as it's news media still blames Apple.

With a bumper Telstra gives the iPhone4 approval for regional and remote use. I've personally taken a 3G and 3GS across half the country from city to desolate.

They have no issues.

Wake TFU America

Samab,

Telstra upped it's data to 1 gig a day before launch of 4.

And while it is true about population concentration. Regional and remote areas in Australia still have broad coverage. There is also beyond remote.

Someone mentioned virtual carriers. Australia has between 1-4 iPhone4 compatible physical networks anywhere there is network.

You sure about that?

• http://www.att.com/gen/press-room?pi...rticleid=30358

Maybe you should check your totem because it sounds like you're the one who's not awake.

PS: It's expected AT&T will have 14.4Mbps HSPA+ by the end of the year.

Go take a look at the raw data, the Australian observations consist mainly of a group of Optus results at the lower end of the scale and group of Telstra results at the top end of the scale.

Besides the observations were carried out using the iPhone 3G which tops out at 3.6Mbps.

Useless out of date information.

But that's population density and lack of competition as well. I am a Canadian --- 3 national carriers (until very very recently), each sharing massive amount of spectrum, and each carrier serving "smallish" cities.

NYC has something like 20 million people and San Francisco has a very hilly geography --- not that hard to understand carriers facing difficulties.


I am very familiar with MVNO's. There are a bunch of MVNO's in the US as well, but they don't really count in terms of anti-trust issues.

Out of all the outrageous iphone plans, the original Norway iphone plan ranks pretty much the worst in the world. (I am a Canadian, and I thought that the original Canadian iphone plans were bad --- the Norway one was just insane.)

http://www.omh.cc/blog/2008/jun/28/netcom-you-suck/

The best iphone plans have been Hong Kong (6 carriers), UK (5 physical carriers until last year, now they have 4 carriers) and US (4 carriers). The worst iphone plans were Norway (2 carriers), France/Canada (3 carriers). It's just that simple.


AT&T has 7.2 mbps HSDPA network national wide. Verizon is going to have 4G years before the Aussies.

No point of talking about how well Telstra's network is --- without talking about that peanut data allowance. Of course your networks are functioning well --- because they are hardly used at all. Americans talk maybe 3-4x more than Aussies and American carriers (AT&T until recenty) offer unlimited smartphone data. You people are so giddy about Telstra raising the data allowance to 1 GB per month.


So what? Every country has weak and strong carriers --- and that's my point. AT&T is only considered to be weak because they are compared with Verizon. Your weaker carrier is worse than my weaker carrier --- and my weaker carrier is AT&T. But somehow there is a conclusion by many that the US is years behind the other countries.

I'm going to stop arguing about this with you as you just don't seem to be listening to what I'm saying. Your just finding possible reasons to support your original assertion which was only really based on what you thought might be the case. I'm interested in getting as close to the facts as possible, not just random supposing or arguing for the sake of arguing.

So you can win this little "debate" that you've got going here, but nothing you have said has actually convinced me that you are right and I don't see how you've actually presented any evidence, (even anecdotal evidence), to prove your case. I mean sure, New York is dense and San Francisco is hilly, that *could* be why the reception on the iPhone is "bad in the US and apparently not elsewhere," but I don't see it as very likely. When we are talking about the whole rest of the world versus a large country like the USA, surely matters of geography should all even out in the end and thus not affect the results at all.

In any case, since neither you nor I can conclusively prove anything at all, since your argument (IMO of course) really just amounts to a lot of supposing, and since you seem very set on believing what it is that you believe about this, I don't see that it's worth continuing.

Pardon me if this link has already been posted, but Toronto Star affirms the same thing, that there is no "issue" with the iPhone 4, that it's the best phone ever seen on this planet:

http://www.thestar.com/business/comp...iphone-4-rocks

I live in western Canada but I grew up reading Toronto Star and still do so online.

Canadian carriers historically have always have faster networks than American carriers. Rogers had EDGE speed that was close to 180 kbps.

Each Canadian carriers have massive spectrum licenses, highly concentrated population in 5 large cities, highly regulated with insane government regulations that don't allow foreign carriers to own a Canadian wireless carrier, insane $720 ETF...

Canadian carriers basically mint money --- of course they can give us (I am a Canadian too) higher speed.

American military takes a big chunk of spectrum, then the spectrum available has to be divided by 4 national carriers, then that tiny spectrum has to be used by 300 million people with vastly inferior population density... Then they give you unlimited smartphone data.

Quite a few iphone carriers around the world have given out 100MB, 250MB and 500MB data allowance --- of course their networks look good. Americans also talk 3-4x more than the rest of the world --- of course American notice drop calls frequently.

Launch was delayed around 3 hours, assuming a 9am start was intended. Some claim the original intention was, like Aussie centres, for a midnight kick-off, but that plan died some days before launch. No, I don't know why.

Initially none of the partner retailers believed they would have iP4s to sell but reports are coming in that some partners had some phones, albeit fewer than 40 per outlet.

The numbers of iP4s available at launch seem to be lower than for pervious iPhone launches, in that supplies ran out within a couple of hours in most VF outlets.

Yes, the signal drop issue is evident here. See the iPhone forum at GeekZone for ongoing info. Local signal strength seems to have a bearing on its occurrence.

Online shipping via the Apple Store "estimated 3 weeks".

Prices unlocked are NZ$1100 and NZ$1300. 3Gs still available at NZ$900.

Ultimately the botched launch has perhaps dented Apple's reputation for immaculate stage-managed events, but obviously not as much as the WiFi issues at the WWDC. And we antipodeans are more forgiving of such things than some other cultures so I predict no lasting damage.

I'll probably add a post with my personal experience with the GOD™ issue once I've have an hour or two on a colleague's phone. Meantime, GeekZone is a very even handed tech site so check out the iPhone comments in the "So now you have an iPhone 4..." thread.

Chopper.

Useless information for purposes of this discussion.


You are being disingenuous. Data allowances aren't limited to 1gb, never have been.

If you go by AT&T's stats, the usage patterns of this "unlimited" data showed that people were far from utilising "unlimited" 3G data per month. A very, very small percentage of users were using more than 2-3gb per month, the average was well under 1gb iirc. Hence they changed their plans this year, didn't they?

The "giddiness", as you refer to it, towards Telstra dropping it's prices is a very new thing. I myself am surprised by it (and Telstra). They have a long history of gouging users for their services of any description, particularly their "premium" services such as 3G and wireless broadband. Probably not too dissimilar to AT&T in this regard.

I don't believe the network loading is as much of an issue as you would like to think - Sydney and Melbourne would have similar traffic to any medium to large sized cities in the US. Heck, topographically Sydney could be quite equatable with SF. Telstra also sells wholesale bandwidth to other smaller telcos, so it's network has this traffic to deal with as well as it's own.

And whilst I haven't spent hours searching, I am yet to find any information that says AT&T matches Telstra's current network speeds. If they do, that's cool, as I said it's not a pissing contest. The main point of interest is the absence of antenna issues over here (so far), as far as I am concerned.

Useless to quote theoretical max peak download speed and conclude that you are ahead.

A very small number of Americans do use a lot of data --- and these small minority disrupts the network for the vast majority of the people who use data at reasonable amount.

People only have their iphones for a few hours --- too early to say that there is no problem down under.

I wasn't referring to theoretical peaks in my last post, although I should note that you started it with the theoretical max. business - not to mention the vapour-stats.


And Telstra's is in place at 42Mbps already. And then it won't be much longer before it is improved once more.


So you admit the infrastructure at the moment is insufficient for the demands placed upon it? There are high-end users everywhere, you realise. But of course you will retort that North Americans must be the highest of high-end users...


what part of "(so far)" don't you understand?

Nope, after 3 years of reading the silly carry on from the USA I'd have to say I'm on the money. AT&T started 7.2 roll out last year with the 3GS, we already had it blanket with 14mbit strongly established. We had a 3G network 4years before the original iPhone.

America sees it's savior as Verizon where you can't use net and voice at the same time operating on a piddly data rate.

I've read USA news medi a blaming Apple for 3G thinking they invented it. I've read the comic adventures of people coming off dumb phones and crying about battery life, cause they have no idea.

Why have there been no reports from Europe and Australia of dropped calls, poor reception and death grips? Because we have well established cellular networks.

What gets me the most is how the Americans aren't proud of AT&T. these poor sods have had to roll out an entire network while getting pounded in the media and via data.

It's ridiculous and you all hope LTE will save the day when you still don't even have the current generation figured out.

Wake up, it's not the phone. The iPhone4 has been recommended for regional and remote use in Oz. I've used the 3GS extensively in the most remote places you can imagine.

It's a awesome phone when on an awesome network.

Don't worry the USA is streets ahead on landline performance. It's just that Australia due to size and small population has really cranked cellular.

And as another Aussie mentioned we are already at initial LTE speeds with 42mbit HSPDA.

The iPhone4 even with twice upload speed doesn't even test the Australian cell network. It's only 7.2mbit.

Next the Americans will be arguing not many people have such devices in Australia. When the opposite is true. Smartphones have huge uptake in Australia and the iPhone has more than 40% of the market.

Speed and signal strength are two different things.

Speeds are often capped down here in order to provide reliable service. I know that's what Vodafone New Zealand do so don't take Wired's word for it.

More often than not the slower speeds work out on average faster because there will be fewer bottle necks. Remember the explanation Apple gave why PPC was faster than Intel despite having slower clock speeds? Same deal with slower but more reliable 3G speeds.

You forget the reason behind those dropped calls. I work in Wellington as well and suffered the same issues but it was revealed that it was because of Telecom's XT Network not being filtered and interfering with Vodafone's network.

That article is from iPhone launch in 2008. Most people picked Optus who offered a very cheap plan. And back then, Optus also throttled iPhone speed which they don't any more, to reduce network congestion.

This is my iPhone 4 on Telstra. Faster than existing 4G networks. Entirely 850mhz HSPA network at 21mbir. World's best 3G network that is almost always in 5 bars range. Infact the bottleneck here is the iPhone 4.
People on Optus and Vodafone though in Australia, those carriers are about as bad as AT&T, you'd think you should see similar death grip results on them





Telstra is already managing those average speeds on 3G.


You can get the iPhone 4 for around $70 a month with 3GB cap on Telstra, if you don't select the default data plan. Comparable to AT&T.



Sydney ain't no small city. Has a larger downtown than San Francisco. And Telstra gets around 2-4 mbit in the downtown, the network is a bit more congested there.
Sydney: http://img126.imageshack.us/img126/8...scf6481km6.jpg
http://img255.imageshack.us/img255/6...scf6485xc1.jpg
San Francisco: http://freelargephotos.com/001142_l.jpg
http://freelargephotos.com/000554_l.jpg
P.S. Did I mention our carriers all offer tethering for free ? (except Optus that is)

Vodafone is no slouch as far as iPhones and iPads go in metro areas they are also bottlenecked by the devices.

Don't forget Vodafone rolled out the first HSDPA network in Australia, just before telstra rolled out Next G.

P.S.

GO WALLABIES

Good to see another Wellingtonian! :-)
Nah it wasn't that spate of dropped calls. It was another one, just in my local area on my local tower. I didn't get any problems anywhere else on my iPhone or BB.
Unless.... The Vodafone guy was lying to me!
*looks suspiciously at the phone*

This is a false dichotomy, combined with an artificial scenario and a false analogy, all based on an incorrect understanding of "free enterprise" and its benefits and drawbacks. I don't really understand why "free enterprise" enthusiasts feel the need to make these sort of doomsday arguments to support their positions. Sure, total government control of everything isn't a good thing. But unbridled "free enterprise" is at least equally evil. Clearly, the proper course lies somewhere between the extremes. Yes, as always, the devil is in the details, but while people insist on these emotional arguments based on distortion and fear, we make no real progress in any direction.

Holy cow... you've posted something we can agree on.

[Faints dead away and has to be revived with a cold glass of superb NZ sauvignon blanc]

I don't believe that at all.

New Zealand used to have the telecommunications infrastructure as a State Owned Asset and we had the best telecommunications system in the world at the time. The reason was simple... we worked with telecommunications companies as a testbed for their products.

I guess it was easy for New Zealand to do this because we were the perfect nation to do it. We had enough population to give reliable results but we were small enough to roll back if things went wrong.

Once Telecom got sold off and went private our once awesome system became a third world joke and it's only now with more competition that we are starting to get back on track.

Privatisation DOES NOT mean better systems. Everything you said would happen if the Federal Government ran the telecommunications happened in New Zealand BECAUSE of privatisation.

In reality socialism works for the people not for the few people with tonnes of money. Unfortunately New Zealand stopped being socialist in the late 80's and the country has been poorer for it.

It's dual carrier for 42 mbps --- which means you need 20 MHz (10 up and 10 down) of spectrum space. It has nothing to do with US being ahead/behind --- it has to be with the fact that Australia doesn't have much of a population.

Infrastructure for AT&T may be insufficient --- doesn't mean that the entire US is insufficient. Where are the high-end users when Telstra only up the allowance to 1 GB per month. Your high-end user is our low-end user.

Of course Verizon is slow, but they are doing 1.5 MHz up and 1.5 MHz down for data.


You only care about it THIS YEAR --- 3G has been around for 10 years and nobody cares about this CDMA disadvantage. It fundamentally means that Qualcomm made the right choice 10 years ago. Meanwhile all you got is WCDMA 3G with video calling that nobody uses for 10 years.

WCDMA is a gas-guzzling concord and EV-DO is a Boeing 787 with the latest composite materials to improve gas efficiency.


Again it's spectrum efficiency. US will never give a carrier 20 MHz of spectrum space.

It basically means nothing with that statistic --- the iphone owns 70% of Japan's smartphone market as well. It just means that nobody uses smartphone in Japan.

You basically built a bridge to nowhere and too expensive with a toll. No handset is designed for that speed, and the monthly rate/data allowance doesn't allow the general population to use it.

Simplistic. Our urban centres on the east coast are as densely populated as virtually any North American city, with similar demand for 3G services. If I am not mistaken, iPhones per capita is amongst the highest in the world here.


The issue at hand is AT&T! Other networks are irrelevant because they don't have the iPhone running on them. We are talking about iPhone performance.


Simply wrong! I can get 6gb with $400 of call/text allowances on Telstra for A$79/month! (US$71). ie, bugger all!

When 3G was launched less than 10 years ago speeds were up to 384kbps down and around 64kbps up.

HSDPA (sometimes referred to as 3.5G) has been increasing exponentially and left CDMA behind years ago.

So what sort of download speeds do you generally get on Verizon (almost half owned by Vodafone), as I stated before on Vodafone Australia I average 3.5Mbps with peaks around 5.5.

A Telstra user has posted even higher speeds.

Why don't you give us some numbers of just how SLOW the Droids really are, in spite of their over enthusiastic marketing.

What can a user expect if they link five or six devices to a Droid wifi hotspot?

I'd imagine that the YouTube experience of each would not be terribly good.

See this is an example of something that looks good on paper but is fairly useless in the real world, given the lack of bandwidth it would be something like dial up.

Aussie networks are all good. I just know that Apple Australia managed to perform an excellent rollout of the iphone 4 in aussie. While Apple Aus, who are the ones taht feed into NZ, managed to make a pathetic rollout in NZ.... not so much as having low numbers to sell, just the pathetic lack of communication with them, and their chosen network. At least i am waiting for the same length of time for my two iphones that aussie is... 27th August;


How was the score...

Stood out in the cold for 12 hours for Optus' midnight launch. Worst idea ever.

Not because of any issues, but because I could have just waited a few weeks and actually got sleep that night.

In any case, I have it. No difference in signal no matter how you hold it. Only issue I've got with it is that Optus doesn't seem to get very good 3g coverage at my house (literally just my house, walk to next door neighbours house and its fine), but I have wifi anyway, and its more than likely a by product of the RF interference from all the electrical crap I have in my room.

Would have preferred to get onto Telstra's network, but their data allowance was crap, and when I actually got into the city, placed a couple of calls to mates that work in the stores and found out how many phones they were allocated - Optus 400 in total (for one store, though they opened the second one at 7am), Telstra 110 (for two stores).

Telstra's NextG speed and coverage is EXTREMELY impressive, so much so they've just been certified by the government as being a metro-comparable service for the Australian Broadband Guarantee. This basically means with the rollout of the national broadband network, they'll be covering a lot of the gap that fibre won't reach, with satellite services picking up the rest of the slack.

From the consumer's point of view, it didn't really matter.

Verizon with their slower 3G network, without the iphone --- managed to bring in more contract subscribers (in a iphone launch quarter no less) than AT&T's faster 3G network with iphone exclusivity.

That's the real world --- not your geek talk.

Ah, sauvignon blanc, how I had loved thee... The only white wine worth getting trashed on.



Hah! Bonus points for the Inception reference. As to ATT vs rest of the world, meh, I couldn't be bothered LOL.


As I understand since Telstra is (was?) partly government-owned they had a mandate to cover regional areas. Also I think it was smarter to erect cell towers for coverage in remote areas than have to run tons of landlines everywhere. Aussies can be smart!

Yep, that's the power of Rogernomics. The rich get richer and everyone else gets shafted. Don't even mention the swirling pile of crap that our train system became.