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iPhone 5, AT&T + edge

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barjam

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jul 4, 2010
385
186
I went on a road trip with the family yesterday and was driving in a 2g area with pockets of 2g "partner" coverage and normal 2g AT&T edge coverage.

My wife and I have iPhone 5s. My daughter has a 4 and my son has an android of some sort. The iPhone 5s completely failed. Not once did they stay on edge for more than a minute and most of the time they failed to stay on even voice service despite having full voice bars.

My daughters 4 had very slow 2g data most of the trip and only lost voice once while we were testing.

My son's older android had Internet (very slow at times of course) the entire trip and voice was good.

Being without data while driving in rural areas is somewhat acceptable but the phone not even being usable for voice is not. The fact that the older phones did well with voice and data is a bit worrying. This is a trip we make all the time (visiting grandma) and our previous phone (iPhone 4) never had issues like this either. Basically iPhone 5 is useless for this trip.

For those that are interested the trip is from Kansas City to Pittsburg Kansas via highway 69.

Anyone else run into this?
 
Cowboy1629

Cowboy1629

macrumors 6502
Sep 20, 2012
321
136
Indiana
Be glad you don't live in an area like that, I do!

Actually I don't see any difference in coverage between 3Gs, 4, 4s, or 5 since I have owned all of them in this area and we still have all but the 3Gs active on our accounts. a few miles in any direction I can usually get better service. At home we are on wifi and land lines most of the time. The advantages of living in rural areas...
 
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brc1

macrumors newbie
Sep 14, 2012
10
0
Colorado
I noticed this as well when I was driving across rural Colorado the day after the iPhone 5 came out, although I'm not completely sure if it was partner Edge or AT&T Edge. The iPhone 4 displayed an Edge data connection while the iPhone 5 had no data (it might have still had voice).

The weird thing is the iPhone 4 and iPhone 5 both eventually lost their data connection even when I was back in a reliable 3G area. Both had to be turned off and on completely to restore data service. This had never happened before with my iPhone 4.

Hopefully this is just a network glitch. I still have to wonder if the iPhone 5 falls back to Edge differently than the previous iPhones do.
 
F

Forumapple22

macrumors newbie
Jan 15, 2013
1
0
I travel through out the state of KS. On my iPhone 4 there were only a few areas where I had no service. There were a lot of areas I had edge data. Now on my iPhone 5 a lot of the edge areas I have no data. 5 bars and I can use the phone but no data. Some of the known 4G areas I have to turn off and restart my phone before it will release edge and go to 4G. I think there is a software issue. Something has changed and for someone on the road a lot it makes me wonder if I should have switched to Verizon? I am not happy with this aspect of my new phone. I have not experienced a lot of the other issues I have heard about. I would really like to see this issue fixed soon, in this day and age what good is a phone with no data?
 
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barkomatic

macrumors 601
Aug 8, 2008
4,521
2,826
Manhattan
AT&t has stated that they will completely retire edge service by 2014 I believe--so no one will get edge in a few years regardless of the handset. Still, you'd think a current gen iPhone would at least match an older models performance.
 
B

Bobby.e

macrumors 6502
Mar 11, 2012
394
1
Kansas
barjam said:
I went on a road trip with the family yesterday and was driving in a 2g area with pockets of 2g "partner" coverage and normal 2g AT&T edge coverage.

My wife and I have iPhone 5s. My daughter has a 4 and my son has an android of some sort. The iPhone 5s completely failed. Not once did they stay on edge for more than a minute and most of the time they failed to stay on even voice service despite having full voice bars.

My daughters 4 had very slow 2g data most of the trip and only lost voice once while we were testing.

My son's older android had Internet (very slow at times of course) the entire trip and voice was good.

Being without data while driving in rural areas is somewhat acceptable but the phone not even being usable for voice is not. The fact that the older phones did well with voice and data is a bit worrying. This is a trip we make all the time (visiting grandma) and our previous phone (iPhone 4) never had issues like this either. Basically iPhone 5 is useless for this trip.

For those that are interested the trip is from Kansas City to Pittsburg Kansas via highway 69.

Anyone else run into this?
Click to expand...

Weird. Maybe I will make a run down to Pittsburgh sometime to test that.
 
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