Ever since the MMS carrier update, I've had a weird problem. I get five bars 3G at work, but only 2-3 bars EDGE at home. I work at one end of downtown, and live at the other end -- a grand total of about 14 blocks distance. I used to get five bars 3G in both places.
This is really annoying. I'm getting way more dropped calls and much slower data service at home now. Anyone else experienced anything like this?
You'd think a major city would be a top priority for quality infrastructure, yet my medium-sized city seems to fare much better.
it's all about user to tower density ratios. bigger cities typically mean more people so more users per tower and not always more places to put towers. especially in an even spread.
Quote:
Originally Posted by chronster
A great phone like the iphone deserves more than AT&T. Put that thing on Verizon and see how many dropped calls you get.
possibly just as many. and just as much getting screwed on rates, lousy customer service etc.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ghostface147
However for a Genius to say 30% is normal, obviously all heroes don't wear capes and have no logic to boot.
be careful the words and tone you put in someone's mouth. he said it was normal for the area. and likely has stacks of service records to back it up.
In fact, I bet it is such service reports that made ATT actually do something about the problem. Since you can't take a phone apart they were likely just swapping phones and probably at a rate that was getting obscene. So they started actually thoroughly testing the phones before a swap and not just taking it on the customer's word that the phone is bad because of calls dropping. And discovered that a large number of folks in that area (and probably several others in NYC) were getting tons of dropped calls, at a rate of 25-30%. The hardware was fine, swapping to a new phone clearly wasn't helping because the customers were coming back over and over about getting a crap replacement phone. the software wasn't affecting it greatly, restoring did no good, swapping sims did no good etc. any and all of those should fix the problem if the problem was something on Apple's side. add to this also the lack of issues in other less dense areas of the country which should be seeing the same problems of the hardware had a major design flaw or even a bad batch (if you consider the batch amounts they must be doing to keep up with the demand)
so now they can make a strong case that the issue is ATT. And they have paper trails to back up their claims. which helps them to fight off these various law suits as well as remind ATT that the contract is coming up and if they want an extension the heads must could out of the butts and do something about it. Thus ATT suddenly pops up after months of issues and does something about service.
Quote:
Originally Posted by noexpectations
Well, does that mean that these issues are only on the iPhone? Do the Blackberry users, on AT&T, experience the same % of dropped calls? Not sure.
it is possible. if the phones are basically identical. but not all the 'smart' phones have the internet and such. so they might not be hitting that 3g tap.
also, remember this is Apple and by that they get tons of press and folks love to come on boards and stuff and call BS on the company very loudly cause of the whole "It's Apple, it just works" mantras. other companies don't have that kind of fan/anti-fan base. so even if there were problems, the response might not be as vocal.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Xian Zhu Xuande
I'm not sure how much weight we should put in the response from a single low-level Apple employee, though. It could be that they have statistics of different areas and are simply being honest, or it could be that this is a poor employee who just fired off some general response without much attention or thought, and may not even have reliable information on the subject. 22-30% dropped calls is an extremely high percentage relative to normal statistics.
i doubt he would say something like that if he couldn't back it up. Apple is loathe to have false info out there. Especially about the iphone and ATT. it's like they are sure one day some ATT spy will turn up to catch them saying something that is wrong.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Reztek
Hey guys i believe AT&T is a Lemon and what the hell is the iphone doing in there line up...
Apple had a particular design they wanted to use and only two companies in the US could support it. ATT was the one that wanted to play ball. and probably assured Apple they could handle the load and would stay on top of the issue. They likely didn't expect the iphone to be as popular as it is. Double for when it switched to 3g. But Apple is stuck for now in this contract. as someone else noted, this would be a point against ATT for keeping that exclusive coverage. The problems of a single carrier are also why I think they won't just swap one carrier for another. I think they will unlock the phone and any carrier with the means to take the phone can have it. thus ATT and T-Mobile for now, Sprint and Verizon if they step up to the same plate for later versions and so on. buy it full price from Apple or the carriers can set their own rules about subsidies and sell them like that at their own stores. same game with any 'netbook' that Apple might create that has cell data built in.
Quote:
Originally Posted by formergenius
If AT&T shows there's nothing wrong with the network and says that 22% IS a high amount of dropped calls, then a Genius can replace it under that CR.
of course ATT would say that. they sent the guy to Apple in the first place.
Quote:
The guy in this situation failed to grasp that the Genius was only trying to help. As such, he's an ungrateful a-hole who does not deserve a free replacement.
again, just as guilty of putting words in mouths. no where did the guy say anything nasty about the Genius or even Apple. he was just pointing out that he was told that 30% dropped calls is typical in the area due to ATT's crappy network. He never said that the Genius refused to help, did or did not replace the phone etc. In fact, the Genius made a clear statement the phone passed all tests so the problem has to be the network as was likely asked for by the customer so he could go back to ATT and chew them out and stop blaming the hardware. He could have actually thanked the Genius for being honest and frank with them and for giving him something in writing to leave with. We weren't there so we don't know.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr.Scott
Not sure how many others post here are from Oklahoma but it's not just NYC it's OKC too and the surrounding areas.
again, it's a tower density issue. as in, you have not that many over a lot of space.
and like the folks in the big cities, you and yours should consider a law suit against ATT for having to pay things like data plans that you basically can't use.
Quote:
Originally Posted by sflocal
It's easy to deflect blame to AT&T. I'm sure that when the executives of the other carriers meet in the back rooms (the rooms nobody knows about), they are collectively sighing relief knowing that they were probably in the same - or worse - shape with their network infrastructure.
I can assure you that I would rather live (as most) in NYC with a lousy AT&T network than live in NC with a great network.
That being said the iPhone needs to be on multiple carriers. It is clear that AT&T cannot handle the load. Apple is as much to blame, if not more so, than AT&T for the lousy network.
LOL, wall to wall people, wouldn't be able to drive my car like I wanted to, higher cost of living, living in an apartment instead of a house of my own with a garage, listening to "the city" all the damn time instead of the peace of quiet of my neighborhood.
Sure, you can keep NYC. That being said, I know that some people are drawn to big cities and they can have at it
iPhone actually works pretty well in SF as long as 3G is turned off. Not ideal but sure beats having my calls dropped. The strange thing is I get a lot more bars than I used to when in 3G but have only a slight improvement in connectivity. Sometimes it will be unable to even connect the call with 5 bars. The other day I was unable to a send text after multiple tries until switching off 3G.
Unfortunately, they seem to have downgraded EDGE's data performance. Pages load a lot slower than before or sometimes not at all until I switch to 3G.
Every crackberry here in NY is usually Verizon- I'm sure they use their share.
But whatever AT&T is to blame not iPhone.
I have a Crackberry (on t-mobile) and let's be blunt, BB emails don't have nearly the same data use as Gmail, Yahoo etc, plus no one uses the BB Browser,because it's terrible (at least up to the 8xxx series) - you'd probably need 3 or 4 BBs to have the same data usage as a single iPhone.
I may be wrong, perhaps Verizon would do a LOT better, but I don't see people really hammering their network, because Verizon phones are usually naff and/or locked down anyway, by their shitty software.
New York is a nightmare for cel phones of all networks.
Lots of tall buildings cause multi-path and weak signals which play havoc with cel reception.
I have a Palm Pre and had all sorts of issues in Manhattan on Sprint. Rock solid reception everywhere else including my home town of Miami. So it's not just an AT&T problem; it's a New York problem.
I hear Verizon is best in NYC, since it's the ILEC and they probably have the greatest investment there. But New York, especially Manhattan is a *nightmare* for cel reception.
And reality is reality. Verizon has no such problem here in NY.
This is gospel in NY. Verizon hands down is better than any carrier for reliability, anywhere in the state.
AT&T can blame their spectrum, their service, the iPhone, blah blah blah. The reality is, Verizon is better. I think a lot of the lost calls though, while driving or walking outdoors are still from the switch to Edge form 3G, or vice versa. Just a thought, but it seems like the reason a lot of mine are dropped.
Steel and concrete do not matter. In my house, service is spotty. This is a split level home, made of wood. Go out on the porch, signal and good service. Step in the front door, under the roof, and dropped call. Not good.
Verizon's iPhone plans will cost more money if they ever carry it. My wife's line after taxes is only about $10 cheaper than my 450 minute plan after taxes. She has the eNV Touch, on Verizon. 450 minutes and unlimited SMS/MMS. Unless they are gouging their customers to make up for infrastructure costs now, and then try to push cheaper data plans once they get everything up and running.
I think he's just making a point that there is more to 'location' than the strength of your 3G signal.
Personal anecdote - if such things don't interest you, read no further:
I think if one's calls are dropped consistently, in different locations and times, over a long period of time, then it's the same thing as taking a cross-section survey of multiple users. Identical equipment on the same network should have identical experience.
I've had about a 30 percent dropped call rate since I got my iPhone 3G last spring. Worst in NYC, where I live, but also bad in Portland Oregon, where I travel frequently. I just assumed that everyone here has the same problem due to call volume and the physics of tall buildings everyone is carping about. In Portland maybe it's the hills on the west side? Excuses, excuses...
Recently the phone froze up - didn't receive any calls for about 8 hours and I didn't realize it until I tried unsuccessfully 4 times to make a call (all the while getting internet just fine). Then powered-down, restarted and got 5 voicemails & texts all at once that had been sent over the previous several hours (and I missed a last-minute business appt. because of it). Then it happened again several days later. Called AT&T and the cordial representative had obviously dealt with my experience many times before - she said that the phone needs to power down and restart every few days "to receive service upgrades from the network" otherwise it will stop functioning as a phone. Nice to know, if it's true. She didn't even mention a possibility of the phone itself being the culprit.
Verizon don't have half a million phones constantly downloading and uploading large amounts of data. I think even Verizon would creak under the strain.
30% is probably about right. I'd say one in for or so calls is dropped for me.
But the fact is that CDMA phone calls and ev-do data are on 2 separate channels. Your data experience will suffer with all those verizon iphones, but you will still be able to maintain your phone calls.
The two biggest complaint areas are NY and San Fran. I bet if you took any phone, on any network, and drove around town thru hills and valleys (San Fran) and steel/concrete structures (San Fran and NY), you would have the same drop rate.
Physics is physics. Radio signals do not like to go through steel, concrete, tinted windows, passing Semi's, etc.
Bingo.
AT&T has to improve their deployed spread spectrum solutions.
LOL, wall to wall people, wouldn't be able to drive my car like I wanted to, higher cost of living, living in an apartment instead of a house of my own with a garage, listening to "the city" all the damn time instead of the peace of quiet of my neighborhood.
Sure, you can keep NYC. That being said, I know that some people are drawn to big cities and they can have at it
I'm the same. I live in a suburb-ish place with easy access to my nearest city, but without the pollution and equidistant from the countryside.
I've been all over the world, and never in my whole life have I ever come across people as rude as 99% of the NYCers I met. I'd hate to live there!
I'm the same. I live in a suburb-ish place with easy access to my nearest city, but without the pollution and equidistant from the countryside.
I've been all over the world, and never in my whole life have I ever come across people as rude as 99% of the NYCers I met. I'd hate to live there!
RUDE- who? Us? This is a great place to live - people tell it like it is. We have to, we all intermingle daily. No phony fake smiles when you really want to tell them off. We're pressed for time- we don't have time for all your outdated protocals. I wouldn't want to live antwhere else- at least in the US.
Well, just to give some balance, here in south Florida (Palm Beach, Ft. Lauderdale, Miami), I have never had a problem with dropped calls on either of my iPhones.
Comments
This is really annoying. I'm getting way more dropped calls and much slower data service at home now. Anyone else experienced anything like this?
You'd think a major city would be a top priority for quality infrastructure, yet my medium-sized city seems to fare much better.
it's all about user to tower density ratios. bigger cities typically mean more people so more users per tower and not always more places to put towers. especially in an even spread.
A great phone like the iphone deserves more than AT&T. Put that thing on Verizon and see how many dropped calls you get.
possibly just as many. and just as much getting screwed on rates, lousy customer service etc.
However for a Genius to say 30% is normal, obviously all heroes don't wear capes and have no logic to boot.
be careful the words and tone you put in someone's mouth. he said it was normal for the area. and likely has stacks of service records to back it up.
In fact, I bet it is such service reports that made ATT actually do something about the problem. Since you can't take a phone apart they were likely just swapping phones and probably at a rate that was getting obscene. So they started actually thoroughly testing the phones before a swap and not just taking it on the customer's word that the phone is bad because of calls dropping. And discovered that a large number of folks in that area (and probably several others in NYC) were getting tons of dropped calls, at a rate of 25-30%. The hardware was fine, swapping to a new phone clearly wasn't helping because the customers were coming back over and over about getting a crap replacement phone. the software wasn't affecting it greatly, restoring did no good, swapping sims did no good etc. any and all of those should fix the problem if the problem was something on Apple's side. add to this also the lack of issues in other less dense areas of the country which should be seeing the same problems of the hardware had a major design flaw or even a bad batch (if you consider the batch amounts they must be doing to keep up with the demand)
so now they can make a strong case that the issue is ATT. And they have paper trails to back up their claims. which helps them to fight off these various law suits as well as remind ATT that the contract is coming up and if they want an extension the heads must could out of the butts and do something about it. Thus ATT suddenly pops up after months of issues and does something about service.
Well, does that mean that these issues are only on the iPhone? Do the Blackberry users, on AT&T, experience the same % of dropped calls? Not sure.
it is possible. if the phones are basically identical. but not all the 'smart' phones have the internet and such. so they might not be hitting that 3g tap.
also, remember this is Apple and by that they get tons of press and folks love to come on boards and stuff and call BS on the company very loudly cause of the whole "It's Apple, it just works" mantras. other companies don't have that kind of fan/anti-fan base. so even if there were problems, the response might not be as vocal.
I'm not sure how much weight we should put in the response from a single low-level Apple employee, though. It could be that they have statistics of different areas and are simply being honest, or it could be that this is a poor employee who just fired off some general response without much attention or thought, and may not even have reliable information on the subject. 22-30% dropped calls is an extremely high percentage relative to normal statistics.
i doubt he would say something like that if he couldn't back it up. Apple is loathe to have false info out there. Especially about the iphone and ATT. it's like they are sure one day some ATT spy will turn up to catch them saying something that is wrong.
Hey guys i believe AT&T is a Lemon and what the hell is the iphone doing in there line up...
Apple had a particular design they wanted to use and only two companies in the US could support it. ATT was the one that wanted to play ball. and probably assured Apple they could handle the load and would stay on top of the issue. They likely didn't expect the iphone to be as popular as it is. Double for when it switched to 3g. But Apple is stuck for now in this contract. as someone else noted, this would be a point against ATT for keeping that exclusive coverage. The problems of a single carrier are also why I think they won't just swap one carrier for another. I think they will unlock the phone and any carrier with the means to take the phone can have it. thus ATT and T-Mobile for now, Sprint and Verizon if they step up to the same plate for later versions and so on. buy it full price from Apple or the carriers can set their own rules about subsidies and sell them like that at their own stores. same game with any 'netbook' that Apple might create that has cell data built in.
If AT&T shows there's nothing wrong with the network and says that 22% IS a high amount of dropped calls, then a Genius can replace it under that CR.
of course ATT would say that. they sent the guy to Apple in the first place.
The guy in this situation failed to grasp that the Genius was only trying to help. As such, he's an ungrateful a-hole who does not deserve a free replacement.
again, just as guilty of putting words in mouths. no where did the guy say anything nasty about the Genius or even Apple. he was just pointing out that he was told that 30% dropped calls is typical in the area due to ATT's crappy network. He never said that the Genius refused to help, did or did not replace the phone etc. In fact, the Genius made a clear statement the phone passed all tests so the problem has to be the network as was likely asked for by the customer so he could go back to ATT and chew them out and stop blaming the hardware. He could have actually thanked the Genius for being honest and frank with them and for giving him something in writing to leave with. We weren't there so we don't know.
Not sure how many others post here are from Oklahoma but it's not just NYC it's OKC too and the surrounding areas.
again, it's a tower density issue. as in, you have not that many over a lot of space.
and like the folks in the big cities, you and yours should consider a law suit against ATT for having to pay things like data plans that you basically can't use.
It's easy to deflect blame to AT&T. I'm sure that when the executives of the other carriers meet in the back rooms (the rooms nobody knows about), they are collectively sighing relief knowing that they were probably in the same - or worse - shape with their network infrastructure.
yep.
I can assure you that I would rather live (as most) in NYC with a lousy AT&T network than live in NC with a great network.
That being said the iPhone needs to be on multiple carriers. It is clear that AT&T cannot handle the load. Apple is as much to blame, if not more so, than AT&T for the lousy network.
LOL, wall to wall people, wouldn't be able to drive my car like I wanted to, higher cost of living, living in an apartment instead of a house of my own with a garage, listening to "the city" all the damn time instead of the peace of quiet of my neighborhood.
Sure, you can keep NYC. That being said, I know that some people are drawn to big cities and they can have at it
I've had no dropped 3G calls in NYC on my Nokia E71.
We're so happy for you. Seriously.
'Bye.
Unfortunately, they seem to have downgraded EDGE's data performance. Pages load a lot slower than before or sometimes not at all until I switch to 3G.
Ouch. Everyone loves a NYC snob.
I think he's just making a point that there is more to 'location' than the strength of your 3G signal.
Every crackberry here in NY is usually Verizon- I'm sure they use their share.
But whatever AT&T is to blame not iPhone.
I have a Crackberry (on t-mobile) and let's be blunt, BB emails don't have nearly the same data use as Gmail, Yahoo etc, plus no one uses the BB Browser,because it's terrible (at least up to the 8xxx series) - you'd probably need 3 or 4 BBs to have the same data usage as a single iPhone.
I may be wrong, perhaps Verizon would do a LOT better, but I don't see people really hammering their network, because Verizon phones are usually naff and/or locked down anyway, by their shitty software.
Lots of tall buildings cause multi-path and weak signals which play havoc with cel reception.
I have a Palm Pre and had all sorts of issues in Manhattan on Sprint. Rock solid reception everywhere else including my home town of Miami. So it's not just an AT&T problem; it's a New York problem.
I hear Verizon is best in NYC, since it's the ILEC and they probably have the greatest investment there. But New York, especially Manhattan is a *nightmare* for cel reception.
And reality is reality. Verizon has no such problem here in NY.
This is gospel in NY. Verizon hands down is better than any carrier for reliability, anywhere in the state.
AT&T can blame their spectrum, their service, the iPhone, blah blah blah. The reality is, Verizon is better. I think a lot of the lost calls though, while driving or walking outdoors are still from the switch to Edge form 3G, or vice versa. Just a thought, but it seems like the reason a lot of mine are dropped.
Steel and concrete do not matter. In my house, service is spotty. This is a split level home, made of wood. Go out on the porch, signal and good service. Step in the front door, under the roof, and dropped call. Not good.
Verizon's iPhone plans will cost more money if they ever carry it. My wife's line after taxes is only about $10 cheaper than my 450 minute plan after taxes. She has the eNV Touch, on Verizon. 450 minutes and unlimited SMS/MMS. Unless they are gouging their customers to make up for infrastructure costs now, and then try to push cheaper data plans once they get everything up and running.
I think he's just making a point that there is more to 'location' than the strength of your 3G signal.
Personal anecdote - if such things don't interest you, read no further:
I think if one's calls are dropped consistently, in different locations and times, over a long period of time, then it's the same thing as taking a cross-section survey of multiple users. Identical equipment on the same network should have identical experience.
I've had about a 30 percent dropped call rate since I got my iPhone 3G last spring. Worst in NYC, where I live, but also bad in Portland Oregon, where I travel frequently. I just assumed that everyone here has the same problem due to call volume and the physics of tall buildings everyone is carping about. In Portland maybe it's the hills on the west side? Excuses, excuses...
Recently the phone froze up - didn't receive any calls for about 8 hours and I didn't realize it until I tried unsuccessfully 4 times to make a call (all the while getting internet just fine). Then powered-down, restarted and got 5 voicemails & texts all at once that had been sent over the previous several hours (and I missed a last-minute business appt. because of it). Then it happened again several days later. Called AT&T and the cordial representative had obviously dealt with my experience many times before - she said that the phone needs to power down and restart every few days "to receive service upgrades from the network" otherwise it will stop functioning as a phone. Nice to know, if it's true. She didn't even mention a possibility of the phone itself being the culprit.
Verizon don't have half a million phones constantly downloading and uploading large amounts of data. I think even Verizon would creak under the strain.
30% is probably about right. I'd say one in for or so calls is dropped for me.
But the fact is that CDMA phone calls and ev-do data are on 2 separate channels. Your data experience will suffer with all those verizon iphones, but you will still be able to maintain your phone calls.
The two biggest complaint areas are NY and San Fran. I bet if you took any phone, on any network, and drove around town thru hills and valleys (San Fran) and steel/concrete structures (San Fran and NY), you would have the same drop rate.
Physics is physics. Radio signals do not like to go through steel, concrete, tinted windows, passing Semi's, etc.
Bingo.
AT&T has to improve their deployed spread spectrum solutions.
LOL, wall to wall people, wouldn't be able to drive my car like I wanted to, higher cost of living, living in an apartment instead of a house of my own with a garage, listening to "the city" all the damn time instead of the peace of quiet of my neighborhood.
Sure, you can keep NYC. That being said, I know that some people are drawn to big cities and they can have at it
I'm the same. I live in a suburb-ish place with easy access to my nearest city, but without the pollution and equidistant from the countryside.
I've been all over the world, and never in my whole life have I ever come across people as rude as 99% of the NYCers I met. I'd hate to live there!
I'm the same. I live in a suburb-ish place with easy access to my nearest city, but without the pollution and equidistant from the countryside.
I've been all over the world, and never in my whole life have I ever come across people as rude as 99% of the NYCers I met. I'd hate to live there!
RUDE- who? Us? This is a great place to live - people tell it like it is. We have to, we all intermingle daily. No phony fake smiles when you really want to tell them off. We're pressed for time- we don't have time for all your outdated protocals. I wouldn't want to live antwhere else- at least in the US.
.... all you outdated protocals.
Who are those? The ones out on the 'left' coast?
Who are those? The ones out on the 'left' coast?
Nah, they just have their Guhvenator, their "Mission Statments" they have to post in their offices, and their economy from hell.