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AT&T Dropped Call Rate of 30% Considered Normal in New York City

VenusianSky said:
So this is a headline article based on a diagnosis and opinion of an Apple Genius Bar technician? In additoin, it is coming from a reader on Gizmodo. It may or may not be true that 20-30% dropped call is expected for those areas, but why headline this article when it is merely coming from the voice of an Apple store representative? It is very deceptive and may trick people into believing that this is a factual statement coming from AT&T themselves. Too many people on the internet always believe what they read from any source and that is why the legitimate journalist are p o'd about the future of journalism and reportings.

Edit: Sorry, not headline, but front page.
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Agreed. I'm not sure how much weight we should put in the response from a single low-level Apple employee...but for some reason, his/her opinion is now accepted as a fact.

I'm not saying that there are no service issues, but I wonder if they would be any better at Verizon (who refused the iPhone) or Sprint or T-Mobile.....or anyone else.
 
jasondono said:
This is exactly my experience in Brooklyn, NY. I'm considering going back to Verizon. How much does it cost o break the att contract?
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175 minus 5 dollars for every month completed under contract. I just looked up that info myself last week :)
 
Safari is terrific, but phones with the latest Opera aren't too bad at all.

Verizon's got the Touch Pro 2 if you like keyboards, and soon the Imagio (info here), both of which are world phones (CDMA and GSM) with WVGA on a huge touchscreen.

They're supposed to be getting a couple of Android devices this year, and of course one or two Pre models early next. The days of Verizon being device barren seem to be disappearing.

As for the remark about big cities, everyone up here around NYC knows that Verizon takes pride in making sure there are no dead spots in their home area. Report one, and they'll fix it. They have literally thousands of mini cells on buildings downtown.
 
30% dropped calls in NY with iPhone/AT&T??

Hi,

I'm thinking of switching from Verizon to AT&T to get the iPhone. However, I'm hearing horror stories of up to 30% dropped calls in the NY area.

For all iPhone/AT&T users in northern NJ and NYC area, can you verify that you experience around 30% of dropped calls?? is this true??

http://gizmodo.com/5370493/apple-genius-bar-iphones-30-call-drop-is-normal-in-new-york

I want the iPhone, but not if it comes with such bad service!!

Thank you,

olimits7
 
Definitely

olimits7 said:
Hi,

I'm thinking of switching from Verizon to AT&T to get the iPhone. However, I'm hearing horror stories of up to 30% dropped calls in the NY area.

For all iPhone/AT&T users in northern NJ and NYC area, can you verify that you experience around 30% of dropped calls?? is this true??

http://gizmodo.com/5370493/apple-genius-bar-iphones-30-call-drop-is-normal-in-new-york

I want the iPhone, but not if it comes with such bad service!!

Thank you,

olimits7
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I totally agree.. atleast 1 in four calls is definitely dropped in this area.. i dont blame the iphone though.. its AT&T.. cause i never used to drop calls on my iphone in upstate ny
 
Just curious... is that special tool the only way to get the call stats from your iPhone? Sounded like interesting data.
 
Thanks for the replies...

Ok, so AT&T definitely drops calls; that's a given it seems...but for current customers is the dropped calls enough of a pain to leave AT&T/iPhone and go to another carrier??

Thank you,

olimits7
 
I'd say it's more of a yes and no on AT&T quality.
While their service may be spotty in certain locations, the iPhone doesn't exactly have the most stellar antenna.
My iPhone has dropped calls in locations where my N75 (also on AT&T) has never missed a beat.
 
True, that's a good point...I guess the issue is partly due to the iPhone and AT&T's network.
 
kdarling said:
As for the remark about big cities, everyone up here around NYC knows that Verizon takes pride in making sure there are no dead spots in their home area. Report one, and they'll fix it. They have literally thousands of mini cells on buildings downtown.
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KDarling, I was wondering what these mini cells look like on buildings...
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_0_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7A400 Safari/528.16)

Yeah, I hardly try to make calls. I'd rather text or email because even here in LA calls get dropped alot.
 
I'm lucky I guess

I live in upstate NY and I've only had maybe 2-3 dropped calls on my iPhone since I've had the 3g. I now have the 3gs and it's the same.
 
TBH, I'd rather deal with dropped calls than VZW's inability to handle data and phone calls at the same time. I had a lot of OTA programs on my Tour and Storm, and I missed about 1/4 calls that were sent to me. Most were during the working day. The worst was when my mom was frantically trying to reach me because my grandmother had to go to the ER.
 
Would it be out of line for me to suggest that AT&T should hire an outside agency to determine what the normal dropped call percentage is in each market, and then offer those markets a monthly discount on their rate equal to that percentage?

I am in Southern California, Orange County area and would say my dropped call rate is around 20%. I spent some time in San Francisco in July and the service was horrible, my biggest problem was with data and the accuracy of maps ... which can be an issue when you're walking around a town like that and you've never been there.
 
xbuddycorex said:
Would it be out of line for me to suggest that AT&T should hire an outside agency to determine what the normal dropped call percentage is in each market, and then offer those markets a monthly discount on their rate equal to that percentage?

I am in Southern California, Orange County area and would say my dropped call rate is around 20%. I spent some time in San Francisco in July and the service was horrible, my biggest problem was with data and the accuracy of maps ... which can be an issue when you're walking around a town like that and you've never been there.
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Stupid question, but they don't already use an outside agency for that?

OT: I used to live in Aliso Viejo (OC) and had Cingular for my carrier. Over a 60 day period, the service got so bad in my house I could no longer make/receive phone calls. When I called CS to complain about the service, I was told that the contract I signed never states Cingular was required to provide cell service. I still don't know if that was true or not, but I dropped them that day and went with VZW.
 
olimits7 said:
Thanks for the replies...

Ok, so AT&T definitely drops calls; that's a given it seems...but for current customers is the dropped calls enough of a pain to leave AT&T/iPhone and go to another carrier??

Thank you,

olimits7
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I recommend trying it yourself.....you have 30 days to try it and see if you experience dropped calls in your area.
 
Mischka07 said:
OT: I used to live in Aliso Viejo (OC) and had Cingular for my carrier. Over a 60 day period, the service got so bad in my house I could no longer make/receive phone calls. When I called CS to complain about the service, I was told that the contract I signed never states Cingular was required to provide cell service. I still don't know if that was true or not, but I dropped them that day and went with VZW.
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Errr... wtf??? :eek: Dang. To date, that's the dumbest answer I've ever heard CS give.
 
I guarantee you that Sprint, Tmobile, Verizon, and all of AT&T's other competitors are going to jump on this and make sure it is in every television commercial, print ad, radio commercial, and every other form of possible advertisement. "Do you want to have 30% of all of your calls dropped?..."
 
AT&T IS Piss Poor

From the local AT&T reps here in town they just do NOT give a crap. There network sucks, and the bigshots get there big fat checks and thats it.

They will NEVER catch up, heck they don't even have 3G in every place that they have there bars in the advertisements.

They have the iPhone deal/contract and do not give a dam, money rolls in and goes back out in dribs and drabs.

Come on Verizon and Apple.

I like another posters opinion, get a BB on Verizon and an iPod touch. Luckily my contract is over in December.
 
I live in Delaware and work in Philly and I get full 3g bars all the time with no dropped calls.

But I went to NYC today at the New York game conference and I could barely even get a edge signal! My buddies iPhone would not work either. Turns out 99% of the people at the event had iPhones and we all had the same problem

Soon as we left NYC we got full 3G bars again n
 
FearNo1 said:
Dropped calls is a feature of the iphone... enjoy ;)
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I live in toronto, canada, and here the service is great. We've had MMS since day 1 as well as tethering. Its all lightning fast. Basically no dropped calls and issues like that, but we do pay a small premium.
 
Is Verizon and the competition any better? I don't think so, and that's why AT&T can get away with not investing in additional towers.

AT&T is collecting our money, but not spending the money needed to provide the service we are paying for. I suppose it's great on paper for them and their bottom line, but at some point will this catch up with them?? We are at least a generation behind the rest of the world but AT&T can get away with it because the rest of the competition is doing the same.

I wonder what is pushing the other countries into 4G, and at this rate we may soon be 2 generations behind. A similar situation exists with internet broadband where the rest of the world gets faster internet than us. :(
 
Metatron said:
Having worked very closely with the head engineers of AT&T, I do feel sorry for them. As someone stated earlier, that are spending billions to upgrade the network, but all that money will only meet current demand in some areas. The iPhone is such an incredible success that AT&T never had a chance. The same would be said about Verizon had they got the exclusive contract. If you want to lay the blame at anyones feet, it should be Apple. They should have made a CDMA version and split the load between the networks.
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actually, you are 100% wrong, if you read your history, you would know that apple did everything in there power to get it on as many carriers as possible for this exact reason. and the only company that would take the phone and give 100% control of the operating system was AT&T, and that was under the circumstances of a exclusive contract. And apple did the correct thing, because can you imagine what a iPhone would be if it was tightly controlled by the carrier? i can. its called a LG dare. and every other ****** touch screen phone out there.

Apple had the correct idea, split the load onto as many carriers as possible. but that couldn't happen, because the carriers are bitched greedy bastards, all of them, AT&T being the least bad of all of them, letting apple have control in the first place.

And as for making a CDMA version, thats pure stupid. because thats a dead technology that very few companies use, and only in one country. everywhere else, they use HSDPA, example europe, where the iPhone is available on many carriers, all using HSDPA standard, and there having 0 problems.

So no, Apple is not to blame, they did everything in there power to make it as perfect as possible, and they did. AT&T is to blame, for being greedy and only wanting this phone on there network only.
 
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