A 3G question

[MacDryCleaner]

Hi All -

I have a quick 3G question. Is the benefit to 3G data only or does the quality of the iPhone calling increase as well? For example, at my house I generally get very low signal strength on my phone. Will 3G help me go from 1 bar to 3 bars? I'm not asking for that specific of a range in signal strength but I am asking if the signal strength is likely to be stronger on a 3G network in areas that may have lower signal strength using the Edge network iPhone.

Thanks, Everyone for responses.

 

[mkrishnan]

In general, 3G has to do only with the data services. In the specific case of the iPhone, it's possible that other design changes (like the plastic shell) might improve call reception / quality, but it would be some other design change that coincidentally went into the 3G iPhone and not the 3G technology itself.

 

[kornyboy]

Wirelessly posted (iPhone: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/4A102 Safari/419.3)

I seriously doubt that you will get a better voice signal. I believe that is all based on proximity to the tower. It does have a little to do with the location of the antenna in the device as well but of most other cell phones only pick up one bar it is a good bet that the new iPhone will only pick up one bar as well.

 

[mkrishnan]

^^ Incidentally, I do agree with that. Any improvement is likely to be pretty minimal. Dead areas will probably still be dead areas.

 

[Archie-]

Actually phone calls over 3G have higher voice quality, due to a different voice compression codec being used.

 

[SFStateStudent]

Actually phone calls over 3G have higher voice quality, due to a different voice compression codec being used.

I tend to agree with "mkrishnan" on the dead areas being dead areas even with 3G (at least in my neighborhood), since I have questionable 2-3 bar service inside my home, and the corresponding coverage map (orange) and the 3G coverage map (blue) seem to be pretty accurate, my neighbors have 3G phones and they continue to have 2-3 bar coverage with AT&T, and they live right next door and across the street from me. We live in a valley, next to the San Francisco Bay and though coverage is better with AT&T v. Sprint and VZ, we don't anticipate that 3G will change our reception.

 

[mkrishnan]

I will concede that there is this...

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1552317&tstart=540

...in favor of what Archie- was saying. But it's still not clear to me that it has anything to do with the 3G technology and not just with having newer phones deployed and the infrastructural improvements that were being made during 3G deployment...

Archie, can you provide a source re: 3G GSM phones using a different codec for voice compression?

 

[SFStateStudent]

...in favor of what Archie- was saying. But it's still not clear to me that it has anything to do with the 3G technology and not just with having newer phones deployed and the infrastructural improvements that were being made during 3G deployment...

Interesting discussion. I checked out the following link:

http://www.3g.co.uk/PR/March07/4455.htm

within that discussion, and it was interesting as well. I was amazed that it was written via the UK, but utilized data for the US. Still not clear on my particular situation, since I'm completely in another ballpark as to "actual" testing and results for my neighborhood, though not scientific analysis, but a "hands-on" experience analysis...

 

[Archie-]

Archie, can you provide a source re: 3G GSM phones using a different codec for voice compression?

There is a lot of competing codecs apparently, so its difficult to find definitive information, but certainly UMTS/3G promised better voice quality

How is UMTS different from current second generation networks?

- Higher speech quality that current networks -

http://www.umtsworld.com/umts/faq.htm#f3

With 2G the voice channel had a fixed bandwidth, but with 3G the voice channel is also a data channel, so its in fact a form of VOIP, which is why you can have voice and data simultaneously. For 3G networks they are implementing Adaptive Multi-Rate encoding, which is variable bit-rate decoding, which is a more efficient use of bandwidth.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.722.2

From the GSM wikipedia article.

GSM was further enhanced in 1997[11] with the Enhanced Full Rate (EFR) codec, a 12.2 kbit/s codec that uses a full rate channel. Finally, with the development of UMTS, EFR was refactored into a variable-rate codec called AMR-Narrowband, which is high quality and robust against interference when used on full rate channels, and less robust but still relatively high quality when used in good radio conditions on half-rate channels.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM