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3G poor signal strenght

spoke to a att man

and he told me "they are having some network problems" he said that he was sending me a boost? and to turn my phone off at night, wait about 30 seconds, and turn it back on...but there was no change

surprisingly, he was a really nice guy, essentially said they know they are sucking right now and it will be better soon
 
I'm getting 441kbps on 3G right now and am not happy at all. This phone may be going back. Thing that ticks me off is the guy at the apple store kept telling me that the coverage is fine and kept giving me the runaround as to if I could get a new number for a week to try the coverage out before I canceled my contract with Verizon and had my number ported over. Kept pushing it until I said whatever and just had it ported over that day. Now I have crappy speeds and am out $150 with Verizon. Needless to say I will be talking to both an Apple manager and an AT&T Manager.
 
animenick65 said:
I'm getting 441kbps on 3G right now and am not happy at all. This phone may be going back. Thing that ticks me off is the guy at the apple store kept telling me that the coverage is fine and kept giving me the runaround as to if I could get a new number for a week to try the coverage out before I canceled my contract with Verizon and had my number ported over. Kept pushing it until I said whatever and just had it ported over that day. Now I have crappy speeds and am out $150 with Verizon. Needless to say I will be talking to both an Apple manager and an AT&T Manager.
Click to expand...

Would like to know what happens. I'm not happy right now either, but I had the other iphone for a year so i'm definitely not in the same boat as you. I'm sure a lot of people are, though... I would love to hear from Apple themselves pretty soon, but i don't think that's going to happen...
 
pianos101 said:
This is getting ridiculous. Is this an iphone problem, an ATT problem, or BOTH??? Sitting at my desk, where i ALWAYS got full bars on Edge with my old iphone, I get the same on the new phone, but only 3 bars with 3G.
Click to expand...
My experiences - and many others - are totally the same... Great signal on EDGE, but lousy 1-2 bars on 3G and it drops back down to EDGE sometimes.

I'm hoping some news from either Apple or ATT comes out today... this problem is effecting most people... :mad:
 
aimfire said:
My experiences - and many others - are totally the same... Great signal on EDGE, but lousy 1-2 bars on 3G and it drops back down to EDGE sometimes.

I'm hoping some news from either Apple or ATT comes out today... this problem is effecting most people... :mad:
Click to expand...

I don't understand these complaints, this is by design and how 3G works all over the world. By the nature of the air interface 3G networks require higher cell density than 2G, therefore you are often going to have the phone handing over to 2G, even during calls and data transfer. Also, it means you're less likely to get 5 bars but so what, it just means your phone is having to up the power a bit to maintain the connection.
 
skabadelic said:
Yeah. my signal is really low on the 3G iPhone. Two bars average. With Gen 1 iPhone I was almost always full bar.

I've also noticed that this thing gets REALLY hot. I mean...jesus hot.
Click to expand...

Yea I've noticed that it gets hot too, and the battery drains pretty quick.
Is that the 3G overworking itself?

Anywho, I do the same; turn 3G off and get a full signal.
Although, when I'm in downtown Chicago, I get an excellent 3G signal, but whe I go back home (out by O'Hare), I'm lucky to get 1 bar of 3G signal.

The bottom line is that 3G hasn't spread very far beyond big cities yet. Give the network time to expand and everyone's 3G signals will improve.
 
i have the same problem in my apartment - 1 bar on 3g 3 or edge. i wonder if lower bars affect battery life.

i called att and told them of my problem - she did a scan of my area and found 3 towers that were "downgraded" and required service. whatever that means. - she also sent an updated tower list to my phone - but i don't think it made any difference.
 
Well this has been my only issue and here are my findings: On the AT&T map I'm supposed to be completely blanketed with 3G but I barely receive 1 bar. I called AT&T and they said something is wrong, not good, you have 7 cell towers within your address, you should be strong. They sent me to the local AT&T store to replace my SIM to see if that would work. Literally I drove about 1 mile. While in the store and talking with the assistant manager, he said, yeah, 3G coverage here isn't good (shocker). After installing my new sim he said don't look for 3G here cause we don't get it. I found it very funny that my area is covered with 3G and yet even this guy was rolling his eyes about 3G coverage and I was IN an AT&T store.

So my new sim intact and I headed home. I had full bars, nice. Until I made a left and went 50 yards and then the signal went from full to nothing. I'm on a flat street, no trees, no hills. Annoying!
 
Yeah, I am near Oklahoma City, which has nice 3G coverage based on AT&T map. However, I am generally in the 1-3 bar range. Seems to fluctuate quite a bit. Hopefully this will be addressed.
 
This is a more general remark: it'll take years until the new 3G/UMTS networks will have the same coverage as current GSM.

GSM was much easier to build - in plain, rural areas you could set up a tower and cover 10 square km with it. For 3G you need at least 5 antennas to cover the same area.

AT&T has only just started building a 3G network. Here in Switzerland they started 3 years ago and while coverage is pretty good, it's still worse than GSM. So: chill - you'll have to accept that it'll be a while before coverage becomes good.
 
alejovh1 said:
anyone outhere experiencing poor signal streght on their new 3G?
The 3G works great but I get better phone signal on my iPhone v1
Click to expand...

I'm getting between 3-4 bars on 3G this very moment. I'm using my phone to type this on now. It's working very well for me here in Denver Colorado. Very pleased with 3G.
 
jecapaga said:
So my new sim intact and I headed home. I had full bars, nice. Until I made a left and went 50 yards and then the signal went from full to nothing. I'm on a flat street, no trees, no hills. Annoying!
Click to expand...
I'm also in Southern CA and having same issues... seems that there are quite a few "holes" in the coverage area, despite the coverage map that ATT provides...

I'm also in a heavily blanketed area and only get 1-2 bars of 3G, sometimes 3 if I'm lucky. I top out at 53 kb/sec - this is in both my living room near a large window, and also outside on my open-air 3rd floor balcony. With EDGE, I get the full 5 bars at home all the time.

I had to do some errands tonight, took my iPhone with me and watched the 3G bars as I drove around... about 3 blocks away, it suddenly jumped up to a full 5 bars! I did a speed test and found my rate had also jumped up to about 98 kb/sec... That's better, but still very slow for 3G, despite the 5 bars.

I also watched the 3G bars as I was driving home, and wouldn't you know it.... it DROPPED back down to 1-2 bars as soon as I got on my block. So lucky me... my block is in a giant 3G Hole, lol.

I'm still not sure what to make of all this... even at full 5 bars, the 3G rate speed was very below normal. And there are definitely holes despite what ATT's coverage map tells us. I suspect the 2.0 firmware could probably use a little fine tuning, as well as ATT's network being terribly spotty.
 
3G on = No Service

In Buena Park and Irvine in California. Working fine all weekend and now I get no service on 3G. I am going to the Apple store tomorrow to get another phone. I would like to think it's ATT, but everyone is pointing to a bad batch of phones. :(
 
I'm starting to think you're right...
I have an ATT 3G celluar "air card" on my PC laptop, just did a test on SpeedTest.net... I got a speed of 1544 kb/sec, which is about right for 3G.

In the same room, with iPhone 3G, I'm topping out at 56 kb/sec max (inetworktest.com) ....

Despite the hoies I found in the 3G network while driving around, I don't think it's an ATT problem...

Ugh... I'm really hoping this is something than can be fixed with a firmware patch... But to play it safe, I'm going to exchange my iPhone at the store today too... (I also have some problems with sharp edges because it's not flush with the metal bezel.)

Interesting though, while you do see this being brought up in the forums, there's not a major outcry like with the yellow tint on the screens, lol. I'm not sure if people just aren't noticing the problem, or if there was indeed a bad batch of phones...
 
Glad you guys started this post. I bought my iPhone on Sunday. It's great so far, but my network has been switching from EDGE to 3G every so often. I checked ATT's website and it shows 3G network very strong in my area both at home and work, but I usually get either 1 BAR, or it switches to a full set of bars on EDGE.

Very strange. Kinda beats the purpose of having a 3G phone if you don't really get a whole lot of 3g coverage.
 
I'm in San Francisco. In my home I am getting just 1 bar, but the speedtest reports 546k. The higher the freq, the less penetrating it is. So what I'd like to see is a profile app for the iPhone which allows me to leave an icon on the desktop with pre-set, location-based settings.

For example, when home, I am connected via WiFi. So I want to click on a home profile which sets to WiFi on, 3G off. However, when I am on the road, I wat to switch to 'mobile' and have the settings switch to 3G on, WiFi off.

I think a cool util like that would be awesome about now. Still, even with one bar, 3G does what my 2G cannot. It allows data and voice at the same time, and it's still faster. All things considered, this is what happens when you adopt a cutting edge (no pun) network. 3G is very new for AT&T. They are just getting started building out the network. It's only going to get better. And no matter what the bars say, I still get better performance with 3G. In the end, that's what I am paying for. Really what I truly want, is the profile switcher.

Alex
 
My phone and data reception is superior on the 3G iPhone to what I experienced with my Blackjack, also on AT&T. I find that even with low bars I am having clear conversation. Perhaps they have calibrated the bars in a very stingy manner on the iPhone.
 
Oh, and yesterday for the first time I found myself stuck in a spot with only Edge for the first and only time so far. It was only briefly, but yikes, Edge is slow. I am glad I waited for 3G, that would have been frustrating. 3G is fast on this thing.
 
sjobs@mac.com said:
In Buena Park and Irvine in California. Working fine all weekend and now I get no service on 3G. I am going to the Apple store tomorrow to get another phone. I would like to think it's ATT, but everyone is pointing to a bad batch of phones. :(
Click to expand...

FIX = new phone. I exchanged it and the new one works just fine. FYI.
 
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